Lisa Wollin : FP and VS

Working with ASP.NET Controls in FrontPage

lisawoll — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 23:45:00 GMT

I wanted to post a quick note about an add-in that one of the FrontPage testers, Harris Chan, developed for working with ASP.NET controls in FrontPage. To be honest, I just installed it, so I haven't had a lot of time to work with it. If you're interested in downloading and installing the add-in, you can find it on the FrontPage Add-in Center

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them. I'll forward them onto Harris.

Using ASP.NET with FrontPage 2003

lisawoll — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 19:05:00 GMT

We've published a new FrontPage article on working with ASP.NET pages, called Using ASP.NET with FrontPage 2003. The author, Dave Berry, a FrontPage MVP, has worked extensively with Web development and FrontPage.

FrontPage Visual Studio Saga Continues ...

lisawoll — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 08:56:00 GMT

I've been burried in FPSE land lately and haven't had much time to play with ASP.NET Web applications in FrontPage, but I did spend some time, and I can tell you, my experience was not good.

Here's my setup. For whatever reason, my ISP doesn't have the server extensions configured so that I can edit my personal site directly in FrontPage, so I've set it up to FTP. I transferred all of the files for my personal site to the wwwroot folder on my local machine. Easy to do from inside FrontPage.

My thinking was that I would create my Web apps directly inside of my site so that I could use the FTP feature in FrontPage. In addition, by putting my site in the wwwroot folder, I could create my Web apps directly from within my Web site, edit them as needed from within FrontPage or work on them in VS, and FTP the whole lot when I'm finished.

Nope. Doesn't work.

When I tried to access the Web app folder, I received an error message that the folder did not exist in the current Web site even though I could plainly see it in the list of files and folders. So I attempted to open the ASPX page in FrontPage from the Windows Explorer and received another similar message. No matter what I did, I was not able to open the ASPX file in FrontPage unless I moved the ASPX page and supporting files into another folder within my site (sans all the hidden vti folders).

I talked to a FrontPage tester about why, and he said there was a KB article about FTP'ing ASP.NET Web apps from FrontPage, but he couldn't remember where it was, and I haven't been able to find it. (If someone knows where it is, please post it. I'm dying to read it!)

With the exception of creating simple Web apps and opening single files within FrontPage for designing, my experience has been less than ideal. I agree with Saurabh Nandu and the many people who have commented (either in feedback, newsgroups, or other blogs) that FrontPage integration with VS could be better, and although both FrontPage and VS are developed by Microsoft, they are technically competing apps, and IMHO FrontPage should compete as if it expects to do business and provide support based on user expectations and needs.

I haven't given up my quest for understanding how FP and VS SHOULD integrate. I strongly believe that a developer should be able to create ASPX pages in either FP or VS within a folder (in my case it was wwwroot, but this could be any folder that has IIS permissions) and manage all pages in a Web site from within FrontPage, whether they be HTML, ASP, ASPX, PHP, XML, XSLT, whatever.

Integrating FrontPage and VS .NET

lisawoll — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:56:00 GMT

I hadn't anticipated posting again so soon, but I wanted to comment on Saurabh Nandu's comment about Visual Studio .NET and FrontPage.

Although both products provide Web development functionality, the two are not intended to be competing products. FrontPage is largely still a design application. WYSIWYG support in FrontPage is better because that was what FrontPage was originally designed to do. VS .NET is largely a development environment and provides a larger set of tools and features for working with ASP.NET code.

Our expected scenario for integration between FrontPage and Visual Studio .NET focuses on teams of designers and developers working on the same sites. Developers write and modify code for Web apps, services, etc. in Visual Studio, and designers pull the projects into FrontPage to design the pages.

FrontPage 2003 made huge strides to integrate with Visual Studio .NET, but we all agree that it doesn't have quite the level of support that people want and need. I can't tell you what the development team is planning for the next release, but I can tell you that we are all aware of the problems with FrontPage and VS .NET integration.

It's true that expected scenarios are not always the real scenarios. People often use FrontPage in ways that we didn't anticipate, and FrontPage and VS integration is much more complex than I've stated above. To help developers who are working with VS and FrontPage, I published on the FrontPage Developer Portal a reprint of a chapter from Jim Buyen's book FrontPage 2003 Inside Out: Using FrontPage 2003 and Visual Studio .NET Together. However, I have read in some newsgroup posts that developers want more information than what is contained in this chapter. To help accommodate this need, we have scheduled an article focused on working with ASP.NET controls in FrontPage, which should be available within the next month or so, and I'm considering writing an additional article based on our targeted scenario (described above).

I have to be honest, I haven't spent a great deal of time working on the integration of VS and FrontPage, so I have no words of wisdom for you ... yet. I will say that I've created very simple Web apps in Visual Studio and pulled them into FrontPage and modified their designs. I admit that I haven't gone through the full process of publishing the app into my site, but on the surface, the integration with FrontPage for my simple app was relatively seamless and straight-forward.

I think, however, that many Web developers want to replace Visual Studio with FrontPage when working with ASP.NET. In this case, developers can write inline ASP.NET code, but I don't believe FrontPage provides great IntelliSense for ASP.NET code. Again, the logic behind this is largely because FrontPage was not attempting to replace or compete with Visual Studio but was intending to complement it with the excellent design tools for which FrontPage is so well known.