>I'm interested in becoming more knowledge in developing ASP pages. I’ve tried the coding from scratch…. I have looked at Adobe GoLive, Macromedia and I have Visual InterDev. I’m interested to know which package I need to spend more time in that would help me in using ASP, SQL Server. The positive and negative of each product based on your experience. Your suggestions and opinions will be appreciated in advance.

I think Thomas gave a pretty good assesment of VID. It's very useful for HTML and script coding due to the color syntax and property sheets (for example if you're in a particular tag you can see what the properties are and even set them in the properties sheet etc.).

It also gives you a handy object browser that gives you client and server side objects and events for prototyping functions.

The database environment designer is a handy feature as well and will assist with the creation of connections and recordset objects.

Definitely stay away from those design time controls (DTC) as well as anything else like remote scripting objects, scriptlets, DTS etc.

I like using InterDev/ASP and with VB it offers a very powerful development package.

I haven't used WebConnect much so I can't comment on that but if you're planning on hosting your app on the Internet, I don't think this would offer a very easy or affordable route. Many ISP's won't deal with the ISAPI extensions for VFP etc. whereas with ASP it's already built in to IIS. I understand that VFP hosting can be very expensive as well. Not to mention the fact that many corporate IT's don't want a Fox solution on the web or anywhere else.

Interestingly enough, I find InterDev and ASP a much more straightforward approach to learning web development. With webconnect, I felt like I was isolated from the web environment because I was dealing with VFP programs almost exclusively. To run anything, I had to run the WebConnect webserver which was also running the PWS webserver and I didn't know where or how things really fit together - it was very confusing (but that could simply be that I'm kind of challenged with technology). I suppose a WebConnect training course would've furthered my knowledge tremendously so that I would feel as comfortable building webconnect apps as with ASP. Apparently webconnect is faster and more scalable as well but you're still looking at an extremely small percentage of the market when you compare it to the numbers and need for ASP developers out there.

Hope this helps and have fun!

-JT