Help pulling information off a SQL server database.

[Bip]

Hi everyone,

First I'll give you some background of what exactly I'm working with. I just got hired at a large company that wants to make a completely new website. The thing is I'm not familiar with the programs and I'm trying to learn all the tools I've been supplied. The tools I have to work with are:

Dreamweaver cs6
Microsoft visual studio 2012
SQL server
ASP.NET

It is a retail business that stores all the items and item information in a SQL Server database. What I've been asked to do is pull the information out of the database when the user types things such as the color, price, etc in a detailed search filter. I've tried to pull the information from the SQL server into Dreamweaver but it isn't really working out. I did some research on the fact and learned that Dreamweaver hasn't really updated their database linking capabilities. I was thinking that I could do all the web editing in Dreamweaver and then port that over to visual studio and from there link it to the database, but I don't know how I would go about that or if that is even the best option.

If anyone has any advice or how I should go about making this work it would be very much appreciated.

[eval(BadCode)]

I'm a huge fan of SQL-SERVER, it's the only M$ software I really think they did amazingly well. When I was working with SQL-SERVER 05 and 08: I used AquaData Studio. It's not the best, but their newer versions really kick butt. I would honestly say without a doubt that your best bet for an SQL-SERVER development client is the official Microsoft SQL Management whatever (the GUI client for their sql server). But, that only works if you're using a microsoft operating system to run the client, which I was not.

I think you can set up an ODBC connection with just about any client (although you'll need administrator priv/ on the SQL-SERVER to set it up).

As far as DreamWeaver goes, I'm not touching that.

[Bip]

Thanks a ton for the reply, I'll check into those things mentioned. I must take the bait tho... why won't you touch Dreamweaver?

[eval(BadCode)]

Try some alternatives to DreamWeaver... firefox+firebug, eclipse, vim, emacs... DreamWeaver is just marketed really really hard, because Adobe makes a lot of money off of it. I think there are many free alternatives which are by far superior. The one fundamental problem I see with DreamWeaver is that Adobe is trying to please everyone, and yet almost everyone only uses it for a specific set of tasks-- making 95% of the features totally useless to them. There are special tools for special tasks and DreamWeaver isn't a specialized tool... it's like trying to hit everything with the PHP hammer; yeah it works... but... you have to hit the nails with the side of it.


Also, I don't know if you're a big Java fan, but "xmlvm" can turn your bytecode into ASP.NET compiled code; at least it claims to be able to. It can also do ByteCode -> Objective C (iphone), and I think it can also do ASP.NET -> Objective C, and ASP.NET -> Java Bytecode. I figured I'd just mention it