Visual InterDev for Not Yet Techies

Is Visual InterDev for your computer career? It is a powerful tool for developing and designing high class web pages. Microsoft is revamping Visual InterDev to be part of its new .NET efforts to transform -- or take over -- the Internet.

Want to put up a web page? Assuming you have an web site host, it’s easy. All you need is Notepad and an HTML reference, and you put up a page nearly as good as millions of web pages. Add a few graphics and you can shine without Visual InterDev.

Of course, writing all your HTML yourself is a pain, and to make your site look good it helps to be able to visualize what you’re doing. That’s why companies have brought out such products as Adobe PageMaker and Microsoft FrontPage and Visual InterDev.

It’s a big and important market, so of course Microsoft has stepped up to the plate with a powerful suite of tools called collectively Visual InterDev for developers putting up industrial strength data-driven web sites. It is project management software for high-end Web development.

Visual InterDev has many of the equivalent strengths that FrontPage has for the individual/small business market, with of course the addition of many capabilities needed by large companies.

It even includes a small version of FrontPage that is the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor. This saves you from coding each individual HTML tag. Of course, just like FrontPage, it also includes the ability to edit the HTML directly, giving the developer the ability to fine tune and correct FrontPage’s HTML choices.

Like FrontPage, Visual InterDev includes The Image Composer. This is a graphics tool for manipulating images. Most developers will still want Adobe PhotoShop, but The Image Composer is handy for making small changes to image files while working on a page.

You can add a control to your HTML page in the source editor and then immediately have access to the control’s properties. It generates script for you, to initialize the control. Visual InterDev has tools to eliminate the need to look up a lot of ActiveX documentation, and even has a wizard for writing scripts to work with ActiveX controls.

It is not the only industrial strength web design tool, but Microsoft’s depth of programming talent and its depth of market penetration guarantee it a secure place for companies putting up major web sites.

You could of course also learn how to use Allaire’s Cold Fusion, which would make you twice as marketable in the job market for this computer career. If you have time to learn only one of these programs, however, Microsoft’s Visual InterDev has to be a serious choice. It is a powerful program in its own right, and it is Microsoft’s.

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