Dreamweaver (CS4) and ASP.NET
First of all I want to congratulate you with the fantastic products like CSS Sculptor, CSS Menuwriter, and SiteAssistPro. I have begun to use Dreamweaver CS4 for designing my ASP.NET sites and I have abandoned using ASP.NET masterpages because Dreamweaver templates are much more flexible en editable. I use Visual Studio Pro 2008 in conjunction with Dreamweaver which works great. Parts of my site are just "simple" HTML pages combined with my own modest AJAX library. (ASP.NET AJAX is in most cases brute overkill...not that i am saying it's useless, on the contrary)
Designing has become a pleasure and the WebAssist products have speed up this process tremendously. Partly because of Dreamweaver and WebAssist I 've also abandoned the control based layout which ASP.NET offers. It makes much more cense to use CSS and tools like WebAssist and only use ASP.NET controls when necessary. But still I 'm addicted to the power of ASP.NET server side code (and C#). I've found out that many more ASP.NET developers have the same ideas about using CSS layouts and DreamWeaver.
Dreamweaver CS4 offers ASP.NET designers great functionality, when building pages from templates DreamWeaver CS4 leaves the declarations for the code behind files or the used assemblies intact when altering the templates. You can also create a new ASPX page with ease and the only thing you have to do is make some extra declarations for the code behind file etc. etc.
CSS Sculptor is the ideal tool for building layouts and even store them separately so they can always be re-used, but unfortunately, while DreamWeaver produces code for a ASPX page (when the server technology is set to ASP.NET C#) CSS sculptor still produces code for a HTML. I would be great when CSS Sculptor had an option to produce code for a new ASPX page. That would save me a lot of copy / paste work.
I use Site Assit Pro when I design "simple" HTML / JavaScript based sites and this really speeds up the design and maintainability and thereby decreasing the costs of maintaining / designing sites, me happy, customers happy. I would be grate if SiteAssist Pro could also produce ASPX pages and leave the declarations section intact. After all XTHML and ASPX pages only differ in a few lines of code, this will even speed up developing time much more.
(Idea:)And after that, CSS Sculptor and SiteAssistPro would also be great extensions for Visual Studio since more and more ASP.NET developers are getting serious with CSS. (All right I would stick to DreamWeaver CS4, but if you haven't got DreamWeaver and still want to design beautiful CSS based websites in ASP.NET sites this would be great extensions).
Yours sincerely,
