Microsoft Visual InterDev

» see msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/interdev as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i used visual interdev a little in the first year of university, maybe '03 or '04. by then asp classic was already on the way out, replaced everywhere by asp.net 1.1 on the windows side and by php elsewhere. but interdev 6 was still sitting on the lab pcs at the engineering faculty, since visual studio 6 was the version the cs department had licensed in '99 and the cd was still passed around. for someone new to web dev coming off a year of c++ in turbo c, opening a vbscript file inside a microsoft ide with color coding plus a debugger felt like a step into adulthood.

about the actual product timeline. interdev shipped march '97 as part of visual studio 97, which was microsoft's first attempt at unifying its language ides (visual c++ alongside visual basic and the rest of the family) into a single product. interdev was the new addition for web work, built around classic asp and the script-debugging engine that microsoft had originally shipped with internet explorer 4. the ide had a project-system view that understood the deployment topology of a web app, with a development copy of the site on your machine plus a staging copy on the server. you double-clicked files in the project tree to edit them in either color-coded text mode or in a visual design view that approximated frontpage.

visual interdev 6.0 in late '98 was the version most people who used it actually remember. the shell was redesigned around the visual basic-style docking ui that visual studio 6 introduced. database integration got proper. you could drag a sql server table from the data view into an asp page and get a databound recordset displayed in a grid, with parameters for filtering. the debugger handled vbscript and jscript stepping across server and client code, which in '98 was a category of tool nobody else had for asp. for two or three years interdev 6 was the canonical asp ide in the same way visual basic 6 was the canonical desktop-business-app ide.

then asp.net happened. the.net framework alpha builds in '00 made it clear classic asp was a transitional product, with asp.net giving you a compiled page model and a real language stack underneath instead of inline vbscript. visual studio.net shipped february 13 2002. interdev was not in it. the.net ide had inherited some of interdev's project shape and design-view ideas but the codebase was new and the language was different. existing interdev 6 installs kept working since visual studio 6 stayed in extended support, the product itself was at end-of-life as of the.net ship date.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

interdev was a strange product even by '97 standards. it sat next to several other microsoft tools that overlapped with parts of its job. frontpage was the wysiwyg html editor for non-coders, while visual studio 97 covered desktop development for the c++ and visual basic shops. the iis manager handled the server-side admin. interdev's pitch was that classic asp web development was its own discipline and deserved its own ide. the audience was the visual basic shop pivoting toward web work, the people who already wrote vbscript-flavored code and wanted an ide that respected that.

the project model was the part that actually mattered. interdev introduced the local-versus-master web project concept that later became standard in web ides: your dev copy on your workstation, a master copy on the server, both kept in sync by the ide. the architecture was clunky in practice (it depended on frontpage server extensions running on iis, which had their own pile of permissions problems) but the idea that web work needed two-machine project topology was correct, and got inherited by every later web ide.

~ the slide ~

the cracks were the same cracks classic asp had. vbscript was untyped and embedded in html, errors landed at runtime as a generic 500-error page, refactoring across pages was manual. the design-time database tooling worked great for demo apps and broke for anything past a few thousand lines. by '00 the developer press was already lining up behind java and the early jsp story, with php rising on the unix side and the redmond camp focused on what would ship as.net. classic asp was the platform you maintained, not the platform you started new projects on.

the second crack was that asp.net's project model assumed you wanted a compiled application, not a folder full of scripts. interdev's whole reason to exist was that asp pages were scripts you edited in place and watched render. asp.net pushed people into the visual studio.net model where you built a project to a dll and deployed the dll plus pages. the workflow shift killed any case for keeping interdev as a separate product, the.net ide absorbed everything interdev had been doing for classic asp plus more for the new model.

~ what carried over ~

visual studio.net inherited interdev's design view and its project tree, plus the sql-server data tooling and the script debugger. by visual studio 2003 the interdev brand was gone, the project type was renamed asp.net web application. the people who had built sites in interdev 6 mostly carried their asp habit into the new ide for a year or two before learning vb.net or c#. some of those sites kept running on classic asp into the late '00s, hosted on iis 5 and iis 6 servers that microsoft kept supporting because too many enterprise customers had not finished migrating.

the cultural inheritance is small. visual interdev is one of those products that everyone who did windows web work between '98 and '02 used, and almost nobody remembers fondly. it did not produce a community in the way visual basic 6 did, since classic asp itself was already on the way out by the time interdev hit its stride. the ide was competent enough to disappear into the work, then disappear into the move to.net. opening a copy of it today on a vm just to see what it looked like is the only way most people would ever interact with it now.

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