A good IDE for classic ASP?

Question

I'm using Dreamweaver, but it doesn't give me classes, functions, subs names when I am starting to write..

Are there any good alternatives?

Answer 1

There isn't anything, since Classic ASP is a scripting language. Visual Studio has very rudimentary Intellisense but only for very basic features and I've found it doesn't help. Your best bet is to stick with Dreamweaver or just use a lightweight text editor with syntax highlighting. I recommend Notepad++

Answer 2

Wayne M; Thanks..

Probably,I'm using Dreamweaver for a long time..

Answer 3

As much as it pains me to say so, visual studio.net 2003 works quite well as an IDE with asp classic pages. Plus, if you use Whole Tomatoe's Visual Assist addin with it, they actually make classic asp fun to code in. Seriously. Totally tolerable AND debuggable. And if you toss in AspUnit for classic, you can easily run/maintain unit tests right alongside all your pages.

It works for classic Asp just like the big boys use for their .Net coding minus a few of the .net niceties, of course

With vs.net 2003 you can actually step though code one line at a time. you get breakpoints. You also get all locals variables shown while stepping and a working call stack which is nice if you have nested objects/procs/includes.

If you get the 'Visual Assist' addin-- and you use option explicit-- you also get a very workable version of Intellisense for all your vbscript objects and procedures. Pretty amazing to get Intellisense in a scripting language however they manage to pull that off.

And for testing your classic code AspUnit is perfectly functional "red/green" visual component.

It took me forever to finally get it all set up together and running proper but it was well worth it for a buttload of legacy code I inherited. Here's some links to all the stuff ref'ed above:

Visual Studio 2003 (not cheap, but stepping though script code-- priceless):

• hxxp://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Professional-English/dp/B00008I9K2

  Setting up vs.net 2003 to work with asp classic:

  • hxxp://www.devx.com/tips/Tip/18204

Whole Tomato Visual Assist:
- hxxp://www.wholetomato.com/

AspUnit:
- hxxp://aspunit.sourceforge.net/

Answer 4

I think that VS2005 is best the way for classic ASP. VS2005 supports debugging and code highlighting. And Whole Tomato's Visual Assist X is necessary add-in. It improves code-highlighting, intellisense for VS2005 and it'll accelerate your works. And you can see VA view like class outline view.