What is the best approach to creating WebForms?

[Jason]

We have a developer who claims the Visual Studio designer is not
sophisticated enough to build enterprise grade web pages and thus hand codes
all of his HTML in such a way as to make the designer impossible to use.

Is this common?

 

[Hermit Dave]

nope... he just doesnt know how to use it properly... there are minor things
but even then its hell lot better and faster to use Designer than hand
coding the html

--

Regards,

Hermit Dave
(http://hdave.blogspot.com)

 

[Marina]

I would have to agree. Though I don't understand why once the HTML part of
the coding is done, why the designer is impossible to use afterwards.

Also, I think people use other products more geared toward web design to
design the visual parts of the page, and then move it into VS.NET to do all
the coding.

 

[Davide Vernole [MVP]]

We have a developer who claims the Visual Studio designer is not
sophisticated enough to build enterprise grade web pages and thus
hand codes all of his HTML in such a way as to make the designer
impossible to use.

Is this common?

I'm not sure to understand which is the problem. If I mean right, you could
use the code behind so you don't need to mix HTML tag with code. The best
way is to separate the presentation from the classe that help you to manage
the page. So you could let developer to manage code and designer to manage
the look and feel of your page.

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Hand-coding HTML, while a good skill, is not a practical one (how much are
you paying this guy per hour?). The Visual Studio.Net IDE does everything
well except HTML. Therefore, I use FrontPage to do the HTML, paste it into
the IDE, and go from there. I also know of a number of developers who
supplement VS.Net with Dreamweaver.

If you do your HTML right, it doesn't affect the Designer at all.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.

 

[Jason]

It is due to the way he is creating the template.

 

[Jason]

I have only been doing WinForms so am not an expert on WebForms. I do like
using the WinForms designer for layout and setting basic properties and am
not anxious to lose this capability for WebForms.

Since we are rewriting a Java/BEA/Oracle Extranet to .NET and it will be
approximately an 18 month project I am toying with the idea of starting
development with the beta version of Visual Studio that has better support
for thimgs like Master Pages, etc.

 

[Guadala Harry]

<<I do like using the WinForms designer for layout >>
At the risk of reading too much into this statement, I'll point out that
laying out controls is one thing and having them appear where you expect in
a rendered HTML page is a different thing. What you see is definitely not
what you get in the world of Web Forms (which is really just HTML and CSS at
the end of the day). On the Web, you have much less control over how pages
display given how different browsers interpret and render HTML, their
various compliance with HTML and CSS standards, etc. The VS.NET IDE (or any
tool, really) won't give you the same results you might be expecting based
on experience with WinForms (which do appear almost exactly at runtime as
they do at design time). A good topic to familiarize yourself with if your
new to Web page development is the various techniques for laying out a page;
each technique has very different advantages and disadvantages. To start off
with, an older yet well-documented method is to do layout with tables,
another is with CSS (CSS-P)...

Good Luck.