Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express review

Verdict:

Review Date: 27 Apr 2006

Price when reviewed:

Reviewed By: Perry Banton

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

There are a couple of new features to help you achieve a consistent look and feel for your website. The Table Designer makes it easier to design web page layouts by using pre-designed templates to achieve a consistent page style. You can also create a Master Page, which defines the look, feel and behaviour for all the pages in your website or just a group. When you create a new page, you simply tell it to inherit the Master Page's style.

To make your website truly dynamic, you will need a data source. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is available as a separate, free download and ships with its own wizard for creating new databases. However, for convenience you may prefer to use the database creation and management wizards that are available directly in Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. These provide a time-saving interface for designing SQL Server 2005 Express databases, and allow you to connect to your data from your web application by drag-and-drop instead of having to write code or open a separate instance of SQL Server.

If you prefer, you can connect your web applications to any data source, such as MySQL, provided you include the correct Connector in your application library. In the case of MySQL you could use the MySQL ODBC Connector or the MySQL .NET Connector.

Although Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition doesn't offer the full power of Enterprise Architect, it is packed with all the features the enthusiast needs to create exciting and dynamic websites. It's still a fairly complex tool to use, though. If you're new to programming, there's a lot to learn, so we recommend reading a book on the subject. You can find a feature on how to program with Visual Studio on page 142. There's little else against it and it's brilliant for anyone who wants to develop web applications.

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