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In the first quarter of 1997, Microsoft introduced Visual InterDev 1.0 (VID), a visual development environment for building data-driven Web applications. The product was well received by most Microsoft developers, and proved to be light years ahead of its predecessorsNotepad-like Web development tools. However, there were some grievances, since developers had become accustomed to a more robust set of visual development features-features similar to those commonly found in most standard Windows development tools.
The March 1998 release of Visual InterDev 6.0, a beta release of the next version of Visual InterDev, addresses many of its predecessors' shortcomings. This release allows developers to begin creating applications for the latest Microsoft platforms, including Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 (IIS) and Internet Explorer 4 (IE4). These new features make data-driven, cross-platform Web application development a faster, richer, and more robust development experience.
The Visual InterDev 6.0 product is a member of the Visual Studio 98 family of development tools, which includes Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++, Visual FoxPro, Visual J++, Visual SourceSafe, and the MSDN Library. In this article, we'll focus on the Visual InterDev 6.0 product. Specifically, we'll briefly review the product while providing examples of its many new features.
An overview
One of the first things you'll notice about Visual InterDev 6.0 is its striking similarity to the Visual Studio 98 (Visual Basic, etc.) development environments. Microsoft was busy this past year making sure that this release of Visual InterDev coincided with its Visual Studio siblings, as shown in Figure A.
Most of the enhancements are not new concepts, but rather old Windows development tool concepts incorporated for use on the Web. The list of new features is long, so we'll mention just the highlights:
A built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor
The introduction of outlines that allow easy navigation through HTML and script
Support for Dynamic HTML
The introduction of data-bound controls using the new scripting object model
An integrated client- and server-side debugger
Improved database tools
Advanced support for team-based development
In the following paragraphs, we'll touch on some of the finer points of a few of these items. In future issues, we'll take a more in-depth look at these and many other new VID 6.0 features.
Improved WYSIWYG page editor
Visual InterDev 1.0 introduced...