Moving on from Dreamweaver

I think .NET definitely has potential to do good code (compiled vs. interpreted, compiled always wins).

However, I think most (though not all) leave it up to ASP or .NET to generate their HTML for them… which ends up being as good as any other WYSIWYG editor (“visual” HTML editing will likely never reach the level of hand-coding).

If a developer took the time to hand code their HTML and just used .NET for the back-end, it could be very well done.

So, you’ve not tried C# before? How about F#?

This is where .NET comes into its own. Since its inception it’s been the MS equivalent of the Java platform, except Microsoft have done a fantastic job on building the language and the platform. ASP.NET has become probably one of the strongest choices for medium-to-large scale websites, and part of that thanks comes down to Visual Studio.

On that subject, as so much of web development is now framework based, why would you object to .NET when compared to either Java, Django, Zend or any other framework? If anything, I think .NET has led the way in regards to MVC, and Razor will probably add more .NET users.

The old days of classic ASP and dragging items onto a blank canvas are long gone.

The first time you run VS2010 after installing (including the free express versions) you’re given the option to choose your workflow. If you go for the straight code option all you get is the basic toolbar at the top, an output/error window and your code with intellisense. It’s far tidier than the likes of Eclipse or NetBeans.

ASP.NET outputs crappy code if you’re a crappy developer. Nowadays the preferred method of building an ASP.NET site is through MVC and all code written is your own. Hell, there are even a number of different views, such as Razor. When you top that off with C#'s support for lambda expressions, code contracts and the rest of the great stuff offered by the .NET runtime it’s become a great object-oriented language that borrows the best things from the world of functional programming.

Admittedly, back in the classic ASP days spaghetti code was everywhere, but now outside of Python I cannot think of a single language I would rather use, and to be honest it doesn’t surprise me that the .NET framework languages are now the second strongest programming language in use in industry (behind Java).

Edit in crimson, from the command line:

C:\work\demo>csc test.cs

Actually gives me more useful debugging output too… though I do miss the ‘take me right to the line that won’t compile’ – but being a c dialect, it lets WAY too much broken code actually compile anyways, so it’s not like that’s a great big help.

I’m sure all the linux dev’s out there can relate. Heck, it even works from WINE… something visual studio itself won’t do.

I like C# – It’s the first time I think anyone actually tried to take C, objects, and combine them in a sensible manner (instead of C++'s "slap them in there any old way, who cares if it works) – I just find visual studio annoying as hell and it frankly gets in my way too much, sucks down WAY too many resources, and the whole ‘drag and drop’ thing loses me completely.

It’s like the transition from TPW 1.5/BP7 to Delphi 1.0 – they “lost me”… I could use OWL and resource workshop, I still can’t figure out how the devil Delphi is supposed to actually work… Same for FPC/Lazarus. I can use FPC just fine, mix in lazarus and, well… Makes no sense and looks like MORE work… sloppy disorganized work at that.

I should be able to get it – I mean, again, I can hand assemble machine language and even get you a opcode count accounting for BUI vs. EU overlaps… But there’s something about visual programming – It contradicts EVERYTHING I know about clean coding practices and how programs should be built… which I suspect is why most of the people writing good software in them treat it the EXACT same way the handful of people making decent sites with Dreamweaver do (So… Paul O’b and … uhm… well there’s… ok, so Paul O’B) – use the code editor, maybe a few of the project management features – and ignore the rest.

At which point, use a simple resource lean flat text editor and the command line compiler. Why not, it works for GCC?

In other words the exact same thing as DW, by the time you know enough to use it, you should have NO legitimate reason to continue doing so… get a flat text editor and test in the actual browser and actual environments. But of course, that would make WAY too much sense for most people. …and listen instead to their science teachers.

Just strikes me as another sleazy shortcut… file it alongside Visual Basic for all the good it does.

Sorry DS, still a complete generalisation. They are great tools if you know how to use them properly. Again, just because you haven’t figured out how to do that, or prefer to be less productive by not using what’s available to you, doesn’t mean the people who do use these tools can’t code. I use code completion, whitespace stripping (only from the end of a line), code folding (brilliant when debugging problems by hiding bits temporarily that are irrelevant to code, or in an OOP setting so you can just expand the function you are working on and see clearly without extra stuff surrounding it). Your own website looks like it has used some sort of whitespace stripping incidentally in that you open one HTML tag on the same line as you closed the previous one. Very odd, never seen such strange formatting!

I’m not sure if I would call C# a “dialect of C” and there is no direct relationship between the two. If I were being pedantic I’d argue that if true then the vast majority of languages are dialects. If C# is close to any language it was Java at around version 1.

Give Mono a try. I was sceptical about it at first, but Microsoft has helped out tremendously and a few weeks ago I managed to get an internal C# application working on an old Fedora box with next to no changes needed at all.

To my knowledge, there are even ASP.NET sites out there in the wild running from Linux web servers.

I suppose there is a drag-and-drop element when building visual applications (i.e. a Windows Application with a form), but I’d say that’s a huge time-saver in those instances, and it’s the route that many modern languages like Java and Python have taken in regards to desktop development. In regards to the topic at hand (Web Development) I don’t think there’s a single instance of drag and drop coding anywhere in the language.

Possibly. I’ve always liked “the UNIX philosophy”, and to be honest I don’t think that any of the modern languages particularly break that. The reason I like C# so much is because of the clean code you can produce with it. Here’s a small example of what I mean.


protected bool AllEmpty(params string[] values) {
    return values.All(value => value.Equals(""));
}

There’s very little fluff in this code and even a non-technical manager can look in at this code, think for a few seconds and know exactly what it does.

I think it’s the culture more than anything really. Nowadays there tends to be an even split between text editors that help out (code completion, syntax highlighting, etc) and IDE’s. Naturally, for a language like C# you’ll want an IDE to save time (write code, F5, done).

Many of them are! Javascript, Java, Perl, C#… even PHP are C dialect languages… Curly brackets for blocks, if, switch, case, function… That’s C. Sure they all play games with it with tiny little tunings; but they’re all at their heart C dialect with chrome trim and function libraries tacked on them. You can do one of them, converting to an other usually involved learning a few minor syntax differences, some minor programmatic differences… and that nobody can agree how objects should be built/handled. That’s how I picked up PHP as fast as I did – Ooh look, $ to say var, no strict typecasting, no pointers… and a MASSIVE built in auto-included function library. OOH, that warranted calling it a new language, sure it did :smiley:

Pascal, Modula-2, Cobol, Fortran, Ruby, Python – NOT C dialect. I’ve never been a fan of AT&T/C dialect languages in the first place; I can work with them, but I’d kill for a GOOD modula-2 compiler with library support and decent documentation. As it is I think that’s why I do so much object pascal still. Verbose language with strict typecasting, strict structural rules, and strict memory management with automatic range checking… Count me in. Lands sake if more programming languages had those features we’d have a lot less buggy software in the wild… Or as Phillip Khan used to say “Memory leak, what’s that? Oh, we don’t have those, sorry.”

Mono is pretty impressive – it’s not perfect 1:1 and lags behind, but it is surprising how much does work.

Which is why most such “desktop” apps are total garbage… well, unless you’re stuck on a system where there is no native equivalent.

You wouldn’t know if from the output I’m used to seeing from ASP.NET based programs. I’ve rarely seen ANYTHING involving the three letters “ASP” online that was worth confederate half-penny… but then I say the EXACT same thing about Dreamweaver so…

Weird, I know enough C and C# I should understand that, but to me it looks like an unnecessary far call, a self reference… and a wee bit of gibberish.

Though that could just be a bad example – it reeks of “function for nothing other than flushing performance”… In other words a job for a compiler macro, NOT a function.

But that’s the machine language in me talking. Problem is I’m seeing people deploying code like that all the blasted time now… nothing like TRIPLING your execution times.

But of course, if you’ve never dealt with the under the hood machine level language operations, concepts like far calls, stack passing and state preservation are likely… well…

Probably a lot of my disconnect with such code – I’m thinking about the penalty such things add under the hood; For example last week I helped a guy NOT have to move off shared hosting (or should I say prevented him from getting kicked off…) by breaking up a multi-table query into separate ones; his result set was so large on an operation called by EVERY visit for logged in users he was choking out the system RAM… My “optimization” of breaking a single query into many smaller ones running full force pimp-slap in the face of what ANY SQL “expert” will tell you. They’re usually so obsessed with the handshaking to mySQL they forget to think about the penalty of shoving around 256k ROWS in the data processing and returns… Say hello to 64 megabyte total data sets for something that as separate queries doesn’t even break 64k. JOIN is NOT always the answer if you understand all the other bits of what’s going on.

I guess I just have a wee bit different perspective on this stuff.

What do you mean move on ? Dreamweaver is top level as far as webdesign goes . You just need to learn how to use it . I’ve been using it since version 6 and never stopped loving it . With all the ultra powerful capabilities it has I would never quit it . The only reason why not to code in DW are RIAs . Then you might want to get into more tools . But for a website i’d never leave it . Once you mastered it it’s addictive .

BTW I also used hand coding since day 1 . WYSIWYG is just a major bonus and a massive visual aid .

If you just use CodeView in DW, there are far better development environments out there with more features.

Got turned on to Komodo edit by a web dev friend and really liked its code hinting that shows what is inside each div.

however stuck with DW as i’d gotten used to it and it’s loverly colour picker :wink:

I think it is cool to use Dreamweaver. I have attended a short course briefing and the speaker describes some of the feature those are really seams good to me. However; I haven’t used it yet.

The coda app looks really interesting, I took a closer look at some features. Considering getting a mac soon, so I was wondering what type of options were out there.

Only from end of line? What does that even mean… wait, are you referring to the removal of trailing spaces? That’s NOT what I mean. Sorry, what I meant is what call “minification” today, back in the day it was called white-space stripping. Removing ALL non-essential white-space, not just a few characters here and there.

Which doesn’t make ANY sense to me as if you’re debugging problems you don’t know what to fold and what not to… as to “extra stuff around it” if it’s before the function or after it, it’s off-screen or out of the way. If it’s inside it, how do you know that’s not where the problem is?!? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Or maybe I’m just spoiled by 1200px tall displays where I kill all the toolbars so I have as much vertical height as possible.

That’s not white-space stripping, notice all the tabs? Like, EVERYWHERE. (admittedly a few of the indentations got messed up when the original template was sliced into the php back-end)

THIS:


	<ol class="jumpto">
		<li>
			<a href="#pageWrapper"
				accesskey="1"
				rel="nofollow"
				title="Top of Page"
			>Top of Page</a>
		</li><li>
			<a href="#mainMenu"
				accesskey="2"
				rel="nofollow"
				title="Main Menu"
			>Main Menu</a>
		</li><li>
			<a href="#content"
				accesskey="3"
				rel="nofollow"
				title="Page Content"
			>Page Content</a>
		</li><li>
			<a href="#sideBar"
				accesskey="4"
				rel="nofollow"
				title="Page Extras"
			>Page Extras</a>
		</li><li>
			<a href="#footer"
				accesskey="9"
				rel="nofollow"
				title="Bottom of Page"
			>Bottom of Page</a>
		</li>
	</ol>

Is NOT whitespace stripped. Whitespace stripped would be this:


<ol class="jumpto"><li><a href="#pageWrapper" accesskey="1" rel="nofollow" title="Top of Page">Top of Page</a></li><li><a href="#mainMenu" accesskey="2" rel="nofollow" title="Main Menu">Main Menu</a></li><li><a href="#content" accesskey="3" rel="nofollow" title="Page Content">Page Content</a></li><li><a href="#sideBar" accesskey="4" rel="nofollow" title="Page Extras">Page Extras</a></li><li><a href="#footer" accesskey="9" rel="nofollow" title="Bottom of Page">Bottom of Page</a></li></ol>

That’s what I mean when I say whitespace stripping. Usually practiced by people who have something fundamentally wrong with their HTML, CSS, javascript or whatever else they are applying it to in the first place! By the time gzip and/or a decent php bytecode cache is done with it, those shouldn’t have more than a 1-2% impact on page speed and most always it ends up biting you in the ass in the long run… EVERY time I see that type of nonsense practiced it’s by people blowing tens (if not hundreds) of k of markup on 1k of content.

See that fly infested maggot ridden piece of corpulent filth known as jquery. Minification/white space stripping is usually just a way to sweep problems under the rug instead of actually fixing them. Do a view source over on a recent Google page for proof enough of that in action.

As to the </li><li> on the same line, that’s pretty common practice especially if you follow the 76 rule – if you mean the </hr> and or </ol><hr /></ul> – that’s a side effect of putting it into the CMS I didn’t bother cleaning up as the output is clean enough to decipher, and it looks cleaner PHP-side. (since they’re in entirely different functions/methods)

I can code in Notepad. It’s not a huge deal the same concepts apply. However, Dreamweaver does some things for you that are nice. The tabbing out is great. Auto-closing tags is very cool. I also like the color coding making it easier to read.

Using dreamweaver doesn’t mean you’re a beginner. You’re just using the tools that you have available to you to make it faster for you.

I’m working on a Mac too, and I’ve done a lot of research before choosing my text editor - which is currently Coda by Panic.

Well, the best choices are:
• Coda by Panic, for lazy people.
• Espresso by MacRabbit (the makers of CSSEdit), for lazy people too, I guess. It’s shiny.
• BBEdit, a powerhorse. Or TextWrangler, it’s great too, and free.
• Smultron or Fraise, depending by your system’s version. It’s an excellent one, really, and free. In fact, if someone would be willing to buy my Coda license, I’d ask the guys at Panic transfer it and go for Smultron.
• A cross-platform IDE such as Aptana Studio or Komodo Edit. I found them very, very good and they run so great that you barely notice that they are based on Java.

I’d suggest you to go for whatever works. And if it’s free, it’s even better. Although it’s great to work on a very polished and eye-candy app such as Coda or Espresso, the truth is that Smultron or TextWrangler, combined with CyberDuck, are wonderful and will fit most of your programming needs.

Which doesn’t make ANY sense to me as if you’re debugging problems you don’t know what to fold and what not to… as to “extra stuff around it” if it’s before the function or after it, it’s off-screen or out of the way. If it’s inside it, how do you know that’s not where the problem is?!? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Makes no sense to you perhaps, but then I’ve seen enough of your strange ‘methods’ to not be at all surprised by that!

It’s quite easy when debugging to know what does or doesn’t constitute part of the problem. Hiding the parts that don’t makes it easier to visualise what is going on with the relevant code. In fact I used this only today when debugging and guess what? The problem stood out straight away when you collapse irrelevant parts of the code and just have the problem parts close to each other. Guess that proves your theory about it not working wrong then!

Collapsing methods also allows you to scroll quickly through a class to get to the method you need, very useful.

That’s what I mean when I say whitespace stripping. Usually practiced by people who have something fundamentally wrong with their HTML, CSS, javascript or whatever else they are applying it to in the first place! By the time gzip and/or a decent php bytecode cache is done with it, those shouldn’t have more than a 1-2% impact on page speed and most always it ends up biting you in the ass in the long run… EVERY time I see that type of nonsense practiced it’s by people blowing tens (if not hundreds) of k of markup on 1k of content.

See that fly infested maggot ridden piece of corpulent filth known as jquery. Minification/white space stripping is usually just a way to sweep problems under the rug instead of actually fixing them. Do a view source over on a recent Google page for proof enough of that in action.

…You do realise that only the production code is minified right? And you can download the full, unminified version of jQuery if you like? Not everyone has the option to turn on gzipping for their server.

As to the </li><li> on the same line, that’s pretty common practice especially if you follow the 76 rule – if you mean the </hr> and or </ol><hr /></ul> – that’s a side effect of putting it into the CMS I didn’t bother cleaning up as the output is clean enough to decipher, and it looks cleaner PHP-side. (since they’re in entirely different functions/methods)

Common practice in DSland maybe :stuck_out_tongue: I’ve never seen it on a single site before, or ever heard of the 76 rule.

Dreamweaver is the best. It is the primary editor I use. Don’t move away from it. The built-in FTP is big plus. Yes, Firebug is good. But you use Firebug in conjunction with Dreamweaver. Use Dreamweaver to write code and Firebug to debug.

You’re not listening, You’re talking about ASP.NET’s webforms which have been replaced by MVC.
Visual Studio is the only option for writing .NET apps.

As for me, I use TextMate exclusively on mac and Visual Studio on the pc.

Am also a newbie in using the dream viewer and i hope i too will get lot of suggestions and tips on using it trough this thread :smiley:

I’m still a huge fan of DW - still havn’t used anything that compares to both the design and codeview panels.

but as a multiple display user when it comes to code editors, tabs are a step BACKWARDS in functionality since they prevent me from seeing three or four windows of code side-by-side;

In vim those are called “windows”, which are different from tabs. You can even have tabs in windows and windows in tabs if you want (dunno why one would).

Ran across a program called “Terminator” which splits your terminal into multiple windows. Though when I looked at the about page it was like all written in Java or something so I passed.
(note: this isn’t a text editor, just a program for displaying terminals differently)

Guess I’ll still suggest the OP try out vim. The worst that could happen is they run screaming from the computer and huddle in a corner for a few hours, sobbing. But after proper initiation to the cult, you can become a superhero.