A good IDE for classic ASP?

In the seven years since this question has been asked, the IDE landscape has changed quite a bit. Reading Classic ASP code on Linux or any other platform is now possible with Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is not Visual Studio, but a completely different editor based on Electron.

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Yes, Microsoft is now shipping code written in NodeJS that runs naively on Linux!


There isn't anything, since Classic ASP is a scripting language. Visual Studio has very rudimentary Intellisense but only for very basic features and I've found it doesn't help. Your best bet is to stick with Dreamweaver or just use a lightweight text editor with syntax highlighting. I recommend Notepad++


As much as it pains me to say so, visual studio.net 2003 works quite well as an IDE with asp classic pages. Plus, if you use Whole Tomatoe's Visual Assist addin with it, they actually make classic asp fun to code in. Seriously. Totally tolerable AND debuggable. And if you toss in AspUnit for classic, you can easily run/maintain unit tests right alongside all your pages.

It works for classic Asp just like the big boys use for their .Net coding minus a few of the .net niceties, of course

With vs.net 2003 you can actually step though code one line at a time. you get breakpoints. You also get all locals variables shown while stepping and a working call stack which is nice if you have nested objects/procs/includes.

If you get the 'Visual Assist' addin-- and you use option explicit-- you also get a very workable version of Intellisense for all your vbscript objects and procedures. Pretty amazing to get Intellisense in a scripting language however they manage to pull that off.

And for testing your classic code AspUnit is perfectly functional "red/green" visual component.

It took me forever to finally get it all set up together and running proper but it was well worth it for a buttload of legacy code I inherited. Here's some links to all the stuff ref'ed above:

Visual Studio 2003 (not cheap, but stepping though script code-- priceless):

  • http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Professional-English/dp/B00008I9K2

    Setting up vs.net 2003 to work with asp classic:

    • http://www.devx.com/tips/Tip/18204

Whole Tomato Visual Assist:
- http://www.wholetomato.com/

AspUnit:
- http://aspunit.sourceforge.net/

Tags:

Asp Classic

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