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Visual Studio 2003If your budget allows, Visual Studio 2003 will probably be the application of choice to use to develop ASP.Net web applications. It is a professional tool which can be purchased in a number of versions according to your budget and needs. The professional version costs in the region of £700 and will be adequate for most development projects. Note that you may be able to get hold of a cheaper licence if you are a student and qualify for an educational licence. There is also the enterprise version of Visual Studio 2003 but I assume that if you are reading this article you will probably not require the additional features available in the enterprise edition. Although the purchase of Visual Studio 2003 does constitute a considerable outlay for the novice developer, if you are serious about developing on the Microsoft .Net platform or your project has any level of commercial significance this software will more than easily pay for itself. Visual Studio contains a host of facilities designed to increase efficiency and make your development life easier. It will allow you to create a wide range of solutions for a wide variety of projects including standard Windows .Net applications, ASP.Net applications, XML Web Services and many others. Visual Studio has both a WYSWYG interface and a code view with built in support for VB.Net, C# and J#. The environment has extensive intellisense which will prompt you to type correct syntax and prompt you with available options for code. Many of the most common components can be dragged straight from the Toolbox onto the page and the environment will write much of the supporting code for you. A number of wizards are provided to complete common tasks and they will initially help you through many of the areas which might otherwise prove problematic for the novice. This product also provides extensive tools for debugging your applications and this alone may save you hours of time when checking your code for errors. Finally Visual Studio includes facilities for packaging and installing applications so that you can distribute them in a professional looking and efficient format. Installation of Visual Studio may be time consuming (it’s a substantial program) but it is straight forward and will require no assistance. After entering the first CD the installation program will check your computers pre-requisites to ensure everything is correctly set up prior to installation. The set up routine will then prompt you for which programming languages and facilities you require and after specifying installation directories precede with the installation. Other than periodically changing over the 4 CDs you can at this point safely sit back and relax while the rest is taken care of for you.
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