A New IDE for Building ASP.NET 2.0 Pages

With ASP.NET 1.0/1.1, you can build your ASP.NET application using Notepad, Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003, as well as the hobbyist-focused ASP.NET Web Matrix. ASP.NET 2.0 adds another IDE to the Visual Studio family - Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 offers some dramatic enhancements that completely change the way in which you build your ASP.NET applications.

One rather dramatic change to the IDE is that Visual Studio 2005 builds applications using a file-based system, not the project-based system used by Visual Studio .NET. When using Visual Studio .NET in the past, you had to create new projects (for example, an ASP.NET Web Application project). This process created a number of project files in your application in addition to the Default.aspx page. Because everything was based on a singular project, it was very difficult to develop applications in a team environment.

Conversely, Web projects in Visual Studio 2005 are based on a file-system approach. No project files are included in your project, which makes it easy for multiple developers to work on a single application without bumping into each other. Other changes are those to the compilation system discussed earlier. You can now build your ASP.NET pages using the inline model or the new code-behind model. Either way, you have full IntelliSense capabilities. This, in itself, is powerful and innovative. Figure 19-2 shows IntelliSense running from an ASP.NET page that is being built using the inline model.

Figure 19-2

Another feature of Visual Studio 2005 borrowed from the ASP.NET Web Matrix is that you do not need IIS on your development machine. Visual Studio 2005 has a built-in Web server that enables you to launch pages from any folder in your system with relative ease.