Visual Interdev is the
web page development arm of
Visual Studio. While it is in fact an
expensive text editor, as
stx23 pointed out, that is primarily not what it is
used for. Think of
Visual Interdev as a souped up
FrontPage, with better
editing and code
debugging, without things such as
auto controls (like automatic counters and highlight-buttons) and without templates.
Typcially, you would use this product in conjunction with a
FrontPage Server Extensions enabled web site to publish to and
debug a running
web server. Typically,
IIS comes with these extensions
out of the box, and I believe that there are other sorts of
compatible extensions for
Apache. You connect to a site, and work from it, or you can work from a
local directory.
Visual Interdev has three useful
viewing modes. There is the source viewing mode, the layout editing mode, and the
web mode (to see what the web page would look like, finished). All in all, the tool is quite useful (especially if you got it as a part of
visual studio, and all you wanted was
Visual C++ or
VB. You can, however, do without it; I don't use it for my
ASP work. Microsoft publishes a free
script debugger (non-creatively named
Microsoft Script Debugger) that gives you the same sort of
functionality that this program would in terms of
error generation. Typically, I find it more useful to work directly off of a local
IIS machine, than to use
Interdev, although some Web shops use it almost
exclusively. I find the editor of
Visual Studio particularly handy, as it is memory mapped, and thus much faster than
Windows Notepad for editing most
large text files.
Interdev was new to the
Visual Studio suite of
applications with
Visual Studio 97. It has been maintained with that group of
apps, and has been
service packed several times since it's release. It has yet to be seen whether
Interdev will be a part of
Visual Studio.NET.
Interdev's
competitors include
FrontPage (for the consumer),
Adobe GoLive,
Macromedia DreamWeaver, and other small end text editing programs. There are other development system competitors, such as
Allaire ColdFusion and the like, but those are general competitors to the
ASP platform, more than
Microsoft Visual Interdev in general.