Anyone use Visual Studio?

thomashodgson

Senior Member
You might have seen my rant against the price of CS4 on another thread, so I have been looking at alternative (a.k.a cheaper!) web design packages. I noticed on a Net Tuts tutorial that Jeffrey Way used Microsoft Visual Studio and I thought it looked decent. The pricing baffles me though, using Google Shopping prices range from £88.00 to £2000+ for the different versions!

Anyone have any experience of it? Which version would be best for web developers?
 
I would say that Visual Studio is more for programming than web development. The tutorial you linked to still used photoshop for the layout and it looked like he hand coded it in visual studio. There are loads of programs that will mark up XHTML, CSS, and javascript etc for free. Notepad++ is open source and very good. I depends what you are looking for? Are you looking for somthing to handle the design, development or both?
 
Tom is it an alternative to Photoshop that you're looking for?
As Kris mentioned you've crossed across a few different software packages with your explanation and link of what you're after?

Greg
 
Ahh OK cool, sounds like GIMP is your best bet for the Photoshop alternative as Aarlev says, Notepad++ as Kris mentioned as a coding alternative to Dreamweaver (but you will need to be familiar with HTML/CSS) and as for an Illustrator alternative the only open source alternative I know of is Inkscape, but have never used it personally.

Other than that you can look at Fireworks (also owned by Adobe), then there's the Corel alternatives Corel Paint Shop Pro (Photoshop alternative) and Corel Draw (Vector tool, Illustrator alternative) although no idea how they compare on prices these days.
 
Another good alternative to dreamweaver if you want to hand code is bbedit... it does cost (about £120 I think) but it will highlight areas of code in different colours etc (a bit like dreamweaver does) which makes it a lot easier to notice any mistakes where as notepad would just all be the same text/colour making it much harder to work with!
 
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