Visual InterDev 6.0 versus FrontPage 2000: Your Choice [1]

Visual InterDev 6.0 versus FrontPage 2000: Your Choice
Alexander Maltsev  

Visual InterDev 6.0 and FrontPage 2000 are two tools used by Web professionals, but they offer complementary functions. The best one to choose depends on the task you''re tackling.

Many people clearly understand the difference between Visual InterDev® and Microsoft® FrontPage®: Visual InterDev is part of Visual Studio®, hence a developer''s tool; FrontPage is targeted toward novices and those used to dealing with visual WYSIWYG editing. Yet today, thousands of developers are busy evaluating both products, trying to find the proper tool for their needs.
      In this article, I''ll compare the latest versions of the respective products: Visual InterDev 6.0 and FrontPage 2000. I will look at several aspects of advanced Web programming and try to analyze how both products fit into the big picture of Web development.

Graphical and Source Text Editing

      As with previous versions, the default view in FrontPage 2000 is Normal (see Figure 1). It lets you paint a page through a very easy and intuitive interface. A number of helpful toolbars make the editor''s window look like a powerful graphical creation product. The FrontPage 2000 editor supports a wealth of modern technologies, such as HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets 1, insertion of Java language applets, JScript® and VBScript, ActiveX® controls, themes, and even Dynamic HTML effects. I haven''t seen any other tool that can beat FrontPage 2000 for rich features. FrontPage also supports bots, a special set of tags within page code specifically interpreted by the server''s FrontPage extensions and the editor itself.



      Figure 1: Normal View in FrontPage 2000  


      You can click on the HTML tab in FrontPage to switch to pure HTML mode or preview the page in an embedded browser''s window. FrontPage now offers syntax highlighting (also known as color coding) to help distinguish among tags, parameters, and values. Designed as a visual editor, FrontPage 2000 is clearly the way to go for WYSIWYG page layout.
      Visual InterDev 6.0 is less impressive as a visual page editor (see Figure 2). It includes basic HTML functions that are available through the menu or toolbars, but you won''t find native support for dynamic effects or anything really hot. This is partially because Visual InterDev 6.0 is more than a year old and the Internet has been growing rapidly (to say the least), but mostly because advanced developers are used to dealing directly with the code.


      Figure 2: The Visual InterDev 6.0 Page Editor  


      On the positive side, Visual InterDev has a terrific built-in code editor that should look familiar to anyone who has ever spent time with Visual C++®, Visual Basic®, or Visual J++®. This feature alone is worth the price of the product.
      When you work with Visual InterDev, most of your time will be spent looking at the HTML code, although you can also use the package''s fairly rudimentary visual editor (it''s derived from FrontPage 97). While you can use the menu or a few toolbars to get something close to the functionality of the FrontPage editor, I doubt many Web designers will do that.
      If you work in the Source mode you get all the benefits of the integrated Visual Studio package, like configurable syntax highlighting and automatic code completion (type an object, add a dot, and get a popup menu listing all the object''s properties and methods). Automatic code completion is an important feature that helps reduce your typing and the mistakes you''ll make when typing in member function names. Other features like search and replace in specified files (including by a mask) also simplify your work.
      Another interesting feature in Visual InterDev is a revised version of the Reveal Tags feature of FrontPage 2000. You can think of it as a symbiosis of the Source and Design modes. You see the page rendered in graphical form, but at the same time the view shows the tags around elements. Why is this useful? Say you want to figure out why a heading is so small. By looking at the tags around it, you see it uses an H2 style instead of H1—and you didn''t even have to scroll the page or move the mouse!

Creating a Themed Site

      If you''re designing a standard site without any unique elements, you may want to consider using a theme (a set of predefined pages that forms a typical site) and then insert comments and appropriate text into the provided placeholders. FrontPage 2000 includes a bunch of themes you can use, and an optional theme pack provides a huge library of additional themes. Even if you''re an inexperienced designer, you can create attractive, professional sites in just a few clicks. Visual InterDev also offers support for themes, but its library is extremely limited. You can share themes between the two products, but beware—if you customize a theme in Visual InterDev, then apply it to a file using FrontPage, FrontPage might overwrite your customizations.


Online Help and Programmer''s References

      The two products differ greatly in the type of help and HTML reference they provide. FrontPage 2000 includes few details about the HTML language and applied technologies. It assumes that you will mostly draw pages and won''t need in-depth technical information. However, its Answer Wizard is an interesting function that helps a new user get accustomed to the product, and it also provides some handy tips and tricks for more advanced users.



      Figure 3: Visual InterDev 6.0 Reference  


      In contrast, Visual InterDev 6.0 comes with a detailed and comprehensive HTML, JScript, and VBScript reference (see Figure 3). Just as with other tools from the Visual Studio family, if you need some help and press F1, a set of books instantly pops up. Although you won''t read everything in the library, the standard HTML Help-based search engine works very well. If you want to get narrower content, you can define smaller subsets of the information. Most MSDN™ subscribers are familiar with this technology. In fact, the reference that comes with Visual InterDev (and Visual Studio) is a special version of the MSDN Library called Visual Studio 6.0 Edition.
      Another vital part of the Visual InterDev documentation is its ASP reference. FrontPage knows nothing about server-side programming (apart from support for FrontPage extensions), but Visual InterDev fully supports this kind of programming and includes in-depth references.

Site Structure Visualization and Access

      Another important feature of Visual InterDev that I''ve always appreciated is the visual tree pane (called Project Explorer, to be consistent with other Visual Studio tool environments). The Project Explorer shows you the whole site as it relates to its components, helping the user perform many actions, such as adding links. FrontPage 2000 has improved its project view support by combining the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage editor in a single environment (see Figure 4). FrontPage 2000 also provides icons in the main window that let you toggle between viewing the currently edited page and the rest of the site''s content (this was previously located in FrontPage Explorer).



      Figure 4: Project View in FrontPage 2000  


      Visual InterDev lets you put projects into exiting projects so you can work with nested sites in a single visually presented solution (see Figure 5). In contrast, FrontPage 2000 does not support multiple projects loaded simultaneously in a single environment. FrontPage does, however, support workgroups of files, and allows you to mark a page as Not To Publish. This helps ensure that you will never overwrite databases or other time-sensitive files.


      Figure 5: Multiple Projects in Visual InterDev 6.0