Software Review: Microsoft Visual InterDev
By Heidi Brumbaugh
Time was, knowing how to write a program was enough to make you a programmer. Those were the good old days, happy times, where each could labor away in his own town, in his own tower, happily oblivious to the outer world. No one ever needed to go anywhere. After all, experience had shown that if you build a better program, the world would beat a path to your door.
Not so any more.
Now we find ourselves surveying a ruddy landscape of tower after tower, each elegant and functional, but each completely isolated. The new frontier is building roads.
Microsoft's Visual InterDev is one of the first in what is sure to be a crowded market of tools to pour concrete, excavate tunnels, and build bridges between the hamlets of applications, architecture of interfaces and towers of data and functionality already out there.
Visual InterDev is project management software for high-end Web development. It integrates many of the existing tools for Web development, and throws in a few hefty tricks of its own for good measure. Its main features are:
- Support for Microsoft’s new Active Server Pages, a method for server-side scripts to generate HTML pages on the fly
- Support for database integration from desktop (Access and MS FoxPro) to high-end (ODBC compatibility)
- Support for VBScript and JScript (Microsoft’s JavaScript implementation) in your HTML files
- Visual design tools, templates and wizards to help you do everything from generating SQL commands with a point-and-click interface to manipulating exposed ActiveX objects
- A special version of Microsoft FrontPage for WYSIWYG editing
- A color-coded HTML text editor
- Web project file management and link management tools
- Support for VBScript to automate repetitive tasks in Visual InterDev
The Project Window
Visual InterDev’s main screen is the project window where you can manage the files in a Web. In fact, it is not possible to use Visual InterDev to edit a single HTML file, nor is it possible to even open a project if your system isn't running a Web server (Microsoft Personal Web Server, which runs on Win 95 and NT, is included with the program).
Figure 1. Visual InterDev is project-based; with an open Web you can get the big picture.
You can manipulate your open project as a whole—viewing the links in the project, for example, performing routine file management, and even copying the Web to another server via HTTP.
HTML is the lingua franca of the internet, and Visual InterDev has two nice ways to edit it. There is a special version of MS FrontPage for WYSIWYG editing (more on this below), and a nice (and I mean nice) color code text editor. Microsoft knew that no matter how efficient the Front Page editor was, programmers would still insist on being able to get into the HTML code directly, so they took pains to include a text-base source editor that really helps you along. It's color coded, and helps you format programming blocks by automatically indenting text to the level of the line above it. Best of all, the text editor includes context-sensitive help for HTML tags and script commands.
Figure2. InterDev's color-coded HTML editor with context-sensitive help was created with programmers in mind.
Visual InterDev is, first and foremost, a programmer's tool. Each aspect of the program that you use for high-end development follows the same general pattern:
- Start out with a wizard or template wherein you give a general description of what you want to do.
- A Visual InterDev tool or add-in generates script for you.
- You go into the source editor and fine-tune the functionality you want.
This process follows no matter whether you're generating a blank HTML template or a server-side script to generate a page based on a SQL query.
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