I've worked with VWD for about 3 weeks night and day. I kept running into some odd things, and I kept thinking it was because it was an express product. So I ordered Visual Studio 2008 Standard. Let me tell you, VS 2008 fixed some things...but introduced its own set of odd things! But here is my question:

In VWD 2008 Express, in a query, you can put a sql statement with a "?" in it and format a query as (CategoryID = ?), and it works just fine. I installed VS 2008 Standard last night, and I wasted about 6 hours on this simple thing. It turns out, that in VS 2008, the correct format is (CategoryID = ?CateroryID).

Also, in VWD, when you put a "?" in a query, and on the wizard, it lets you add the parameter and bind it to, say a drop down list. On VS 2008, the wizard no longer does this. And VS forces the use of @param1, which will wreck havoc with a MySQL statement and even cause VS 2008 to crash if you aren't careful.

I thought VWD 2008 was Visual Studio 2008 Lite, but they were both ASP.net. Why does a query work in VWD 2008 express, that takes me hours to figure out the exact same query in VS 2008???  That's very frustrating to me.

Thanks,

You should have posted the problems you had in this forum.  I suspect that they would have been answered and you would have saved yourself the cost of the full product.  Your "problems" at the moment have nothing to do with VWD or VS.  You can code a query with ? in it in VS just as you can with VWD.  The web developer part in VS is identical to VWD.  It just has a few more options available.

Jay-B:

Why does a query work in VWD 2008 express, that takes me hours to figure out the exact same query in VS 2008???

The most honest (but blunt) answer I can give you is because you don't really know what you are doing yet.  When you do, you won't use wizards to configure datasource controls.  You won't actually use DataSource controls.

The most honest (but blunt) answer I can give you is because you don't really know what you are doing yet.  When you do, you won't use wizards to configure datasource controls.  You won't actually use DataSource controls.

That's fine. I posted in Getting Started because I am. But controls and wizards are one of the main features of VWD and VS 2008 and since one and I would imagine that the people who coded them expected people to use them...and the people who use them expect them to work.

Use VWD 2008 Express and do a query using the wizard. Put a "?" in it. Now do the exact same thing in VS. Visual Studio changes the "?" to "@Param1." To be blunt...how exactly are they the same if they do two different things???

And here is something that worked in VS but not in VWD. The MySQL .net connector does not show up in VWD, I had to use the odbc connector. It does in Visual Studio 2008. To me, that was worth the money to upgrade.