Web Development with Visual Studio 2008

Better support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will bring Visual Studio 2008 up-to-date with many of the capabilities provided in Expression Web, Microsoft’s Web tool for graphic designers, making it easier for developers to control the look and feel of pages they create and to design for multiple browsers. Also, JavaScript improvements could ease debugging and development for Web developers using AJAX technology to create better Web user interfaces, and they make Visual Studio more attractive to Web developers who have opted for other tools or even no tools at all.

Catching up with Expression

Some new features in Visual Studio 2008 are already present in Expression Web. Although both Visual Studio and Expression can be used to build Web sites, Visual Studio is more developer-oriented and includes the full range of Microsoft’s programming tools, while Expression is aimed at graphic artists and designers.

Web developers use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate the appearance of a page from its content and to ensure that pages on a site have a consistent appearance. CSS information can control virtually every aspect of a page’s appearance, including the font, size, color, and alignment of text, as well as the margins and layout of images. Although CSS information can be placed in the same HTML file that contains the content, it is more commonly placed in one or more separate files, making it easier for every page on a site to use the same styles by referencing a common CSS file and to change the overall look of the site by selecting a different CSS file based on the user preferences.