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I keep searching for this online with no answer. I understand that web development you worry about the front end (HTML, CSS, javascript) and the backend (PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, etc). All of these use different languages, technology, development environment.

My question then is do ASP.NET MVC provide a single IDE (Visual Studio) and one language/syntax to worry about (C#)?

If so, is there an open source comparison to this? If not, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using proprietary technology from Microsoft (ie. licenses, expenses)?

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what keywords / phrases did you use when "searching for this online"? – gnat Mar 28 at 12:08
If you just want one language, your only real options are Dart and nodejs, but I don't think that's what you're asking. – tjameson Mar 28 at 12:24

closed as not a real question by gnat, Martijn Pieters, MichaelT, thorsten müller, maple_shaft♦ Mar 29 at 9:16

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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Modern web development inherently involves multiple programming languages. There is no way around that. At a minimum, any site with dynamic content will use HTML, CSS, and a scripting language of some sort. Most also add Javascript and SQL. This is true of both proprietary and open-source systems.

High-level tools might minimize your contact with some of these languages, but if you are going to do serious web development you will need to know something of all of them.

I haven't used Visual Studio for web development, so I don't know how integrated of a web development experience Microsoft offers. Eclipse is a good free IDE that can be used with almost any language. XAMPP is also a useful tool that installs web services on your computer so that you can develop locally rather than having to constantly upload to a server. I find that Eclipse + XAMPP offers a nice, integrated development experience. I doubt anyone offers a proprietary system that is better (indeed many proprietary software companies distribute a version of Eclipse as their IDE).

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