IDE Suggestion required.Envionment : ASP.NET-VB-JAVASCRIPT

Question

I am working on a ASP.Net project creating a Outlook like calendar scheduler app.

I need to implement javascript on the webpages, but VS 2005 that I am using now is not very helpful, like intellisense or debugging,etc.. in case of javascript. I am planning to use jQuery in the app too.

Questions :

1. Is there some feature of VS 2005 that helps in javascript, that i dont know, or should I move to VS 2008 (is it better than VS 2005 in this regard?) ?

2. And also tell me a good IDE to practice javascript, in a HTML-Javascript environment. I am not going to use Rails or PHP or python.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It would be helpful for you to provide details on what sort of "help" you're looking for.

VS2008 has better JavaScript support than VS2005 in general, including JavaScript debugging. Here's a link from Scott Guthrie about VS2008 JavaScript support.

With jQuery, you can add intellisense to Visual Studio to help you out. Here's another link to a post from Scott Guthrie about enabling the intellisense.

Answer 2

I agree that VS 2008 is much better for the environment you are considering, as you can easily add intellisense support for jQuery. VS 2008 can also debug inside it's own webserver or IIS which means that it's very easy to test your environment.

For our projects we use VS 2008 and code using the MVC framework which has incorporated jQuery. I run each web project inside the debug environment before we deploy to IIS for final testing. I use firebug to debug JS in Firefox, Chrome and safari have their own debuggers and VS 2008 handles IE for me.

Another nice feature of VS 2008 is the ability to publish projects to a specific location copying only the required files. I wouldn't want to publish to a live environment but to create the required files within the final testing environment first is a much needed time saver.

Answer 3

Regarding your second question, RubyMine is a great environment for writing JavaScript - great IntelliSense, and it teaches you best practices, too (something that Visual Studio lacks).

It's quite funny that this isn't that much advertised on the product highlights page (it's in brackets, heh)...