I am relatively new to website design and programming and have been using ASP.Net (VB) for a while. While ASP.Net is awesome, I feel that in terms of website layout and design, Dreamweaver CS4 is superior to Visual Web Studio 2008. I could create a simple but great looking website using Dreamweaver within half an hour, yet find it a bit more difficult to do so using Visual Web Studio (things just don't seem to fall in the right places). What do you guys think?

How about designing the general layout and master page using Dreamweaver, and then put in all the controls/programming in Visual Web Studio?

Using ANY program in WYSIWYG mode is going to yield messy code and all too often unexpected results. My biggest problem iwth Visual Studio is that it's still producing crappy code that ONLY works with IE. I have a .Net developer who uses VS and I am constantly going behind him to fix the lousy code it produces.

That said, you may still use either tool to produce a webpage of the highest quality since both have excellent code editors included.

Originally Posted by NobleJms

How about designing the general layout and master page using Dreamweaver, and then put in all the controls/programming in Visual Web Studio?

You'd be better off designing the page in a visual editor like Photoshop, or the GIMP (free), then using appropriate parts of the resulting product by "slicing it" when coding the site. That is how it is usually done by professionals. If your goal is to be a .NET developer, use Visual Web Developer, not Dreamweaver. It has a free edition.

I have always liked dreamweaver over any other web design software, however, with time I were doing more and more hand-coding in Notaped, and now I almost don't use visual editors at all.

I have been using Dreamweaver for a long time and simply can't recommend Microsoft stuff.. Here's why..

Microsoft is VERY VERY programmer centric. This means that for the most part it will not give you any "shortcuts" to certain things or allow smooth workflow. Most of the time you will need to organize stuff yourself inside Visual Studio or Expression (doesn't matter).

I would recommend Visual Studio/Expression only if you do tight Microsoft integration or your primary development is in .NET.

Dreamweaver CS4 is AMAZING.. not only that you have unbelievable CSS support that's very easy to use, but you have many things that will speed up your work several times, such as Libraries, Templates, quick db connectivity examples, live preview with database you connect to and so on. Plus very easy site management tools like syncing and so on directly.