Okay to mix applications (VS2005 Pro and VWD 2005)

I am use VS2005 Pro on my machine because I do a lot of websites involving SQL databases.

Our department is looking to upgrade our internal website (no databases or anything too fancy).

I am considering installing VWD2005 on their machines because they want to manage their own pages on the new internal site (right now they use Dreamweaver which is not working well with asp.net 2.0 pages).

Will it cause problems if I am using VS2005 Pro while they use VWD 2005 to manage the same website?

Thanks.

Hi climber9,

I go between "real" VS and VWD frequently, you shouldn't have any issues providing you watch out for a couple of things.

You'll have to stick to "Web site" projects as VWD doesn't support the web application project model.

You also can't give it anything more than a website, so if you're organized and have for example a data layer project in the same solution you'll have to separate them out (you should be able to open that datalayer projet in vb/vc express though).

The "web site" model in its own right is pretty portable. I typically use source control, but I've never had an issue when I've had to manually copy a site between the two apps.

The one thing I wasn't clear on was if you wanted to work on the site simultaneously. I've never tried it, and I'd generally recommend against it on purely elitist grounds ;) but as it's all file based you could potentially make that work off a file share (you may need to change permissions/add trusted locations/something if you're not on the same domain). A quick search didn't turn up a definitive yes/no so you'll probably have to try it to know for sure, and do so with a test site incase it eats whatever you're working on. ;)

I hope that helps.

Imco,

Thanks for the great response. We shouldn't have any problem with concurrency since each person in the dept has their own functional areas and thus shouldn't be stepping on others files. It's a small, relatively static set of files, too, so that should also minimize possibilities of undoing someone else's work.

Question about VWD vs VS. In VS, there is the "Copy Website" feature that allows for easily copying a website from one server to another (I use it with mapped network drives from my dev server to my prod server). Can VWD do this as well?

Thanks!

climber9:

I am use VS2005 Pro on my machine because I do a lot of websites involving SQL databases.

Our department is looking to upgrade our internal website (no databases or anything too fancy).

I am considering installing VWD2005 on their machines because they want to manage their own pages on the new internal site (right now they use Dreamweaver which is not working well with asp.net 2.0 pages).

Will it cause problems if I am using VS2005 Pro while they use VWD 2005 to manage the same website?

Thanks.

If your current website doesnt use any database etc stuff and its designed in html then perhaps an upgrade of the site should consider upgrading its UI through standard html (i.e. 4.01 or xhtml) and use CSS etc with perhaps javascript, not asp.net 2.0 because Asp.net 2.0 would be an overhead for that and would increase loadtimes, performace etc if not managed properly.

For the purpose of above, I think dreamweaver is a fantastic tool as it produces standards code that Validates to W3C standards compared to VS2005 or VWD which do not.

For the matter of the question, it wont create a conflict, (other then the conflict of interest, because all users will like to have powerful tool set).

Hi climber9,

climber9:

Question about VWD vs VS. In VS, there is the "Copy Website" feature that allows for easily copying a website from one server to another (I use it with mapped network drives from my dev server to my prod server). Can VWD do this as well?

Yep, VWD has the "Copy Website" functionality. However it does not have the "publish website" option. Having access to VS Pro that's probably not an issue for you. Personally, I prefer the copy method anyways (I like having source I can edit w/notepad when necessary) but sometimes having the site precompiled is a good thing. ;)

I hope that helps.