Layout Absolute vs. Relative vs...my sanity

[Rob R. Ainscough]

Ok, I gotta say I now believe in Voodoo & Magic after working with VS 2005
developing web pages.

I have a standard ASPX web page, the only two controls on the page are a
Label Control (WebControls.Label) and a Button (WebControls.Button). If I
place both controls using Layout = Relative they look correct on the web
page. But when I run the project they're relocated off screen somewhere.
If I go back to design mode and go into "Source" mode on the web page, I see
that left is set to -275px, and top = -20px??? So, if I switch either of
the controls to Layout = Absolute, both controls move OFF the web page (in
design mode) and I have to go into Source again and manually set the
left/top.

Can someone tell me WTF is going on with the VS 2005 IDE and why would it do
this? Is it because I have a dual monitor system or is it just some other
sadistic bug in VS 2005?

(cross posted on aspnet.webcontrols also -- apologize if this causes
issues).

Rob.

 

[DKode]

I personally don't even use the web designer in visual studio. it
sucked in vs 2001, 2003, and it looks like it has transferred over to
2005 as well. I use dreamweaver for the actual layout code (tables/css
etc) of the webpage, then i bring it into visual studio once it looks
like i want, and put in the control declarations etc. and don't even
edit it within visual studio.

a little bit of a pain, but dreamweaver is dead on with rendering the
page EXACTLY as you lay it out (or close enough) in IE,Firefox etc...

my 2 cents!

dkode

 

[Rob R. Ainscough]

I've heard many good things about Dreamweaver - I may explore that route,
but it does seem to be a pain to have to use yet another tool to bypass VS
2005 -- and it would be diffucult to train myself NOT to touch the layout
while I'm in VS 2005 IDE.

It is a shame as the VS 2005 IDE does Windows Forms layout extremely well,
but just returns to the dinosaur when dealing with web forms. I wonder if
there are any add-ins to replace the VS 2005 web page designer?

 

[DKode]

i find it ironic that a 3rd party tool (Dreamweaver) renders webpage
layout better for MICROSOFT IE, then Visual studio, which is made BY
MICROSOFT

 

[Rob R. Ainscough]

I do recall going thru the bug report list (from MSDN) and seeing a
developer's response that suggested he would rather not touch any of the
code that deals with web page layout under VS 2005 as it is very involved --
i.e. could break more than he would fix.

$400 full version is not a bad price for DreamWeaver -- need to get details
on how much ASP.NET 2.0 support is has and how well I can get it to work
with my code behind.

 

[darrel]

$400 full version is not a bad price for DreamWeaver -- need to get
details
on how much ASP.NET 2.0 support is has and how well I can get it to work
with my code behind.

It has zero support for .net 2 and never had support for codebehind.

The solution is to use VS.net for codebehind, DW for any front-end HTML
production.

Alas, that does mean using two tools.

-Darrel

 

[DKode]

like i said, i ONLY use dreamweaver for laying out the page. then i
just copy and paste the html into visual studio.

a pain, but at least you get an html layout that renders correctly in
multiple browsers