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Dreamweaver makes building server-side pages a breeze. It enables web developers to opt for one of five scripting languages: ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP and ColdFusion. Although Dreamweaver does a great job of saving developers time by generating code which will add useful server-side functionality to pages, if you plan to develop an ASP.NET site, Dreamweaver may not be the best choice of development platform.

A couple of years back, Microsoft took the decision to release free “Express” editions of various elements within their industry-standard Visual Studio software. One of these free packages, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, is tailor-made for developing ASP.NET sites driven by SQL Server data sources. So, although Dreamweaver is great at what it does, the benefits of using the free Microsoft solution far outweigh anything offered by Dreamweaver.

The most convincing fact is that the latest version of Dreamweaver CS4 has abandoned support for ASP.NET completely. Secondly, in previous versions, only ASP.NET 1.1 server controls were supported. So, by using Dreamweaver, you will be missing out on all of the functionality which was introduced first with ASP.NET 2.0 and then ASP.NET 3.5. One key feature which almost every ASP.NET website can benefit from is the use of master pages which was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0. Dreamweaver also contains a feature called master pages but it is not nearly as powerful as the implementation of master pages in ASP.NET.

When creating a site in Dreamweaver, it is possible to build a template which contains the entire layout of the page and consists of locked and editable regions. When the template is applied to a page, only the editable regions of the page can be edited. Typically, locked regions will contain elements which are common to all pages in the site or to all pages in one section of a site, things such as logos, banners and navigation links. The editable region(s) will contain the main content of each page.

Each time a Dreamweaver template is changed, the user is offered the option of updating all pages based on that template. This makes the template feature a very powerful tool for updating a website and maintaining consistency across multiple pages.

ASP.NET equivalent to Dreamweaver templates is master pages, with the master page containing fixed regions and content placeholders. There is one key difference, however. In Dreamweaver, all of the markup in the master page is copied into each page based on the template with each update and each updated page must then be uploaded to the server. In ASP.NET, the pages based on the master (the content pages) contain a link to the master but do not repeat the markup found on the master. The ASP.NET engine generates the necessary markup at runtime. This means that to update the common elements of an ASP.NET site, you only need to update the master page(s). There is non need to update the content pages based on the master(s).

Do you need to learn Dreamweaver? We offer Adobe Dreamweaver courses in London and all over the UK.

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