Visual Studio.Net Wysiwyg

[Marty U.]

I know this topic has been beat to death. However, I was sitting here
trying to figure out what Microsoft Does when they develop an ASP.net
for WYSIWYG functionality. Visual Studio's sucks to be honest. And I
don't believe Microsoft has purchased Dreamweaver to do their designs.

Are any of you using Visual Studio exclusively to develop your ASP.net
apps? If so do you have any web sites that can demonstrate the result. I
am really curious how some of these apps/sites look.

Thanks
Marty U.

 

[GVaught]

I am using VS.NET 2003 to create ASP.Net web applications.
Do not mistake VS.NET to be a WYSIWYG with some areas of web development, it
won't be.
It is not designed to create basic HTML based applications, although you can
with some minimal formatting features and apply CSS.
It is designed to create aspx pages. Web Server controls have their
properties set through a properties window. HTML controls will most likely
use CSS for visual effects.

If you want WYSIWYG, use Dreamweaver MX. I understand that it supports .NET.
That is the impression I got from the www.asp.net website.

I don't have any sites to show you as mine is still local to me and still in
development.

 

[Bilbo]

Marty,

I am currently using VS to develop the front-end of my app...you're
right...it sucks. The main problem is auto-formatting (which I suppose
drives this whole WYSIWYG functionality). I swear I will trash my computer
if I have to manually delete another "Z-INDEX" attribute. In some cases,
(especially when using the Internet Explorer TreeView control -no longer
supported by Microsoft btw , VS.NET likes to randomly add 3-4 nested
Tables into the html (thereby screwing up the entire look and feel of the
page). In another case I added a dhtml/css-driven menu to a page, and VS
completly "jacked it all up" (as a co-worker put it).

Once you start manually adding tidbits of DHTML/Custom controls, etc. to the
html VS becomes very finicky (leaving you two choices...VS's way, or the
highway). It's embarrasing to have to mention at our weekly meeting that
anytime you modify the TreeView make sure to manually delete the 4 tables
that magically appear and to also change the TreeView width attribute back
to 689px from 644px...the only positive out of it is the job security you
get, being the only one who can work on it ;-)

anyway...good luck if you partake.

 

[Darren Clark]

Yes you are right.... vs.net sucks badly as a wysiwyg .... very badly....
maybe that is because it wasnt built for design... however you still think
they could have done a better job than they have.

Anyway... i use dreamweaver or hand code for all our designs. then bring
into vs.net once al the html is built.

process goes
1) designer designs the UI
2) Build all HTML pages in dreamweaver and produce html prototype of site
3) bring this into vs.net and finish it off

also becareful when viewing things in the designer view in vs after
dreamweaver has finished... it does a good job or removing tags that it
doesnt know...

 

[Lau Lei Cheong]

Hello,

I agree that one should do their design in whatever webpage degining
software then bring them in VS.NET.
However, you have to agree that if you use VS.NET's IDE to write tags in to
defined schema only, you should
at least feel convienence in writing pages.

Not only the Intelisense autocomplete feature I'm talking about, if you
write tags without closing it, the IDE
will tell you by showing </whatever> when you type "<". Once you fill back
all the missing end tags, you can
switch to designer view than back again. You'll see the excess end tags
being stacked in single row so you can
remove them easily.

Finally, don't know I'm correct or not, even if I removed the schema
meta tag, it doesn't remove any of the tag
it complains doesn't exist. Maybe I should try to see on some tags it
doesn't know...

 

[Mikhail Arkhipov \(MSFT\)]

You can get rid of tables if you set validation target to IE5. If you have
it set to IE3, VS tries to keep positional using tables. Otherwise it will
use styles.

Autoformatting is not, in fact, formatting. Have a look here
http://weblogs.asp.net/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2004/05/16/132886.aspx

Thanks
Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)
--This post is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights --

 

[Robert Gaut]

Marty,

VS can suck quite badly unless you configure it how you want it. Check out
Tools->Options and set up the formatting options however you like.

One of the really annoying things about VS.NET is that by default it will
autoformat markup and place a linebreak and tabbing between <TD> and <IMG>
tags which, for whatever reason, will not render correctly in IE (you get a
noticable space before the image). I set up VS.NET to respect my formatting,
though, and haven't had an issue with it since.

I use VS.NET exclusively for designing all aspects of my Web apps. As an
example, check out one of our demo sites - http://timclay.webmakerx.net/.
(note: this is a demo site so one of the sales guys could change themes in
the middle of you looking at it - just don't be alarmed if the entire site
changes.)

HTH,
Robert Gaut