Waldo Smeets .com

Today I’ve been preparing the Using Dreamweaver for ASP.NET seminar and realized again how powerfull Dreamweaver MX really is! During this seminar the Microsoft presenter will show how you can extend the .NET framework by building custom controls (like Macromedia has done for it’s .NET implementation in Dreamweaver). I sceduled 15 minutes to show Dreamweaver extensibility by explaining how one can create his own custom tags for this custom control (so that you’ll get the appropriate code hints when you are in code view). To my surprise, I only needed 15 seconds to get this working!

I expected that I would have to specify all custom tag attributes and their possible values myself. For the custom tag I am using, this would have been a time consuming job. However, Dreamweaver has the ability of importing custom tags, simply by examining the DLL file! Even though it is a documented feature, I was not aware of it. I found it when playing around in the Edit > Tag Libraries dialog box. You defenitely have to try this yourself when you are working with .NET, JSP or any other tag based languages. Dreamweaver can import custom tags from XML files, ASP.NET files (dll and ascx), JSP tag files and JRun tags. I have not looked at importing CF custom tags yet, anyone?

Anyway, this shows again why Dreamweaver is my favorite code editor, I love it’s customization and extensibility features!