Text Editor vs Visual Studio

When we use vs.net to develop asp.net application, it has many auto-generated files and codes. However,
we can also use text editor to develop asp.net application and there are no auto-generated files or codes
(web.config..). I want to to know if there is any difference between these two methods. Which one is better?

"better" is a personal choice.
VS gives you integrated source control access
VS gives you intellisense.
VS gives you colorized code
VS gives you autoindentation/formatting
VS gives you debugging
Notepad doesn't.
That said, I still occasionally use a text editor for the html aspects, but never for the codebehind.
And in Visual Studio 2005 u also have Refactoring tools for C#.
For VB you can download an addin from Microsoft

I'd recommend anyone new to asp.net writes a small application in a basic text editor so you understand what all the auto-generated files are and how an application works. It's easy to get into a mindset of dragging controls onto a form and never really knowing what exactly this does behind the scenes..

However, for general use, I'd stick with Visual Studio, mainly for its integrated debugging features. If your web application is very graphically oriented, you might want to try something like Dreamweaver for the user interface.

I want to know the differences between a asp.net application that has auto-generated codes and the one that doesn't. And could you further explain the phrase "integrated source control access" ?

The difference is it has autogenerated code...

When you create a new site in VS it places some starting points into the code for you, the page_load events, etc.

Integrated Source Control is a misnomer.. it's more of a hook for the source control. If you are using VSS (or many other source control systems) you will be able to check-in/out files from VS instead of having to go to another app to do this.

mun wrote:

I want to know the differences between a asp.net application that has auto-generated codes and the one that doesn't.

The app with the autogenerated code is one you didn't have to work as hard to create. It's quite possibly also better coded, since you don't forget anything.

You sound like you want someone to say that a hand-coded app done with a simple text editor is better coded, more efficient or faster. That's most often not the case. But if you feel it's better for you, then by all means hand-code everything. The rest of the world will be ten times more productive, of course.

Jeff

I generally dont write codes that are supposed to be autogenerated by vs.net when i hand code my application in a texteditor. therefore, i want to know how that would affect my application (without autogenerated code) .

Might have to provide an example to explain this. All the autogenerated code does is fill in what you could have typed. Some parameters may be defaults yet the autogenerated code specifies them anyway, that's a good coding practice but doesn't affect the application.

Bottom line is, does your app work the way it was intended? Then it doesn't matter if you dictate your code to a chicken and it happens to peck out working code.

Jeff