(Sorry in advance for being long-winded. I've been looking for anyone else who made the same observation and I can't find anyone, and I'm really confused about something.)
I am brand new to .Net and in the course of self-teaching I found an article that describes how easy it is to create an editable, sortable data grid in ASP.Net without writing a single line of code. It talks about creating the connection through the Server Explorer, then dragging a table onto a webform, and -- after setting some options for making it sortable and editable -- presto! You're done. A fully-functional data grid.
I attempted to do this with Visual Studio 2005 Professional, and it created the sqlconnection and sqldataadapter objects in the designer -- but then it stopped. No dataset. No datagrid. As I know nothing about .Net, I fumbled along and read the online help, and found that I had to right-click the adapter to "generate dataset". Then I had to drop a datagrid on the webform, set its DataSource property to that newly-created dataset. Still struggling to make it work, I learned that you have to further write CODE, to "Fill" the dataset, and then to "DataBind" the grid to the dataset. And after all that, it still didn't have all the nice automatic sorting, editing, updating, deleting features that I wanted, and which the article claimed I could achieve.
I thought I was doing something wrong, or that I had forgotten to install a critical component, until I heard of a product called Visual Web Developer "Express Edition" which reportedly does all the datagrid magic. I downloaded VWD 2008 Express on another machine, installed it, and sure enough -- I created a connection, dragged a table to a webform, set a few properties, and my data grid worked just like it was described in the article I'd read -- all without writing one line of code.
Oftentimes I don't want to monkey around with code if I can avoid it -- for some of the smaller, lighter web apps that I develop. This drag-and-drop feature is top-notch (let's not discuss the pros and cons of how this method affects server load right now -- we're talking about little apps used by a handful of people -- plus the code-behind that this generates will help me learn what's going on in the code when it comes time to advance to larger projects). So I decided that Visual Web Developer "Professional" is the product I need at work.
Unfortunately, there IS no Visual Web Developer "Professional" edition!
After much searching, everything I can find says "the VS 2005 edition INCLUDES all the features of VWD 2005". But this is apparently NOT TRUE, because I have already observed vastly different (and greatly lacking) accomodations in VS 2005 vis-a-vis code-free web development.
AM I JUST MISSING SOMETHING?! Some setting or option that says "automatically generate x when adding y"? Some additional obscure download that fills in that gap?
And if the answer is "you simply have to write code in VS 2005, no matter what", I have a follow up question:
Being that VWD 2005 (or 2008 if necessary) is provided by Microsoft as a free "Express" edition, are there going to be any limitations to redistributing or deploying applications I develop with that edition (like the way VB Learning Edition had restrictions)? Because if I can use VWD 2005 to write apps without restrictions, then I'll just use that product and save VS 2005 for when I get more up to speed with actual .Net coding.
Thanks for reading and for your time and expertise!
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