Visual Studio.NET

Microsoft Visual Studio.NET is the most preferred and most comprehensive development tool for developing ASP.NET or any other .NET projects. It provides all development facilities under a single roof. The Visual Studio releases for .NET for the first time allowed developers to almost accomplish all development activities from within a single IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Some of the benefits of using Visual Studio

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  Simplifies the procedure for adding references and Web references by automatically generating and adding the code in the required files.

  
  


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  Simplifies the compilation and debugging processes.

  
  


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  Offers better debugging and error tracing facilities.

  
  


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  Provides help during development through IntelliSense, tool tips and dynamic help.

  
  


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  Simplifies the deployment procedure for Web applications.

  
  


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  Visual designer for designing your ASP.NET pages.

  
  


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  Integration with Visual SourceSafe for source code management and version controlling.

  
  

ASP.NET Web Matrix

The ASP.NET Web Matrix was a free IDE offered by Microsoft for ASP.NET versions 1.0 and 1.1. It was a light weight program that provided a limited set of features. The main advantage of Web Matrix was that it offered visual designing and development facility for developing ASP.NET applications. The IDE also had a built in Web server which allowed you to develop and test your ASP.NET pages without requiring IIS.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition

This may be called the new version of ASP.NET Web Matrix. Visual Web Developer Express Edition is a free IDE for ASP.NET 2.0. It improves greatly on what ASP.NET Web Matrix had to offer. Visual Web Developer Expression Edition can be downloaded for free from http://www.asp.net.

Notepad

It is not necessary to have an IDE for developing ASP.NET applications. You can use Notepad or any other text editor of choice for this purpose. However, compared to an IDE, the development effort that you may need to put-in will be greater in such a case. For beginners, this may be the best option as it offers more learning opportunities since there are no behind the scene activities taking place.