Personally, i also never design in VS.net. My approach is to use Dreamweaver, then i cut and paste the section between body tags to vs.net. If i make a change, i make it to the dreamweaver side, and do another cut and paste. Not very elegant, but it works.

(one advantage of this, is that i have created a backup of my desing, i.e., one in dreamweaver and one in vs)

I also experience dreamwever (mx 6.1) to be lacking, while it has some great property windows, the program itself shows poorly written code, and code formatting problems, so for important pages - its always back to hand coding for touching up the html.

IN my opinion, the market is still open for a great wysiwyg designer, perhaps someone could make a plugin to work with vs.net

For bandwidth savings, something i have thought about is stripping away all the unecessary spaces, tabs, etc from pages which are frequently downloaded.

Michael

Nice article, Milan.

I think you probably know it already, but someone could make use of this. You can avoid copying and pasting your own template by modifying the default one.

If you're using C#, just go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\VC#\VC#Wizards\CSharpAddWebFormWiz\Templates\1033 and modify WebForm1.aspx there. Make a backup copy first just in case.

Now, whenever you do Add Web Form... your template will appear.

This quick and dirty solution works pretty fine, but for a cleaner one, Enterprise Templates could be used.

Ezequiel

There's a HUGE chunk of documentation on how to roll out your own enterprise templates. I managed to read through all of it at one point. It was cumbersome, to say the least. I hope they simplify it somehow. Even that stand-alone tool you can download from Microsoft (I can't recall its name) doesn't make it any easier.

One of my readers said he was going to rewrite standard templates and publish his finding on his site, so I've been waiting to hear from him to avoid doing double work.

Thanks for this post. I've starting using your tool and will take the suggestion of altering my default aspx template in VS.NET. I must say that working with CSS rather than Grid Layout or tables all over the place is fairly hard work (I design online mapping tools that have a LOT of buttons, widgets, DHTML), but seems to be worth the efforts. Thanks again.

In addition, some of the VS meta tags provide intellisense support so are useful for development

Hello Milan,
Your article was really good. I got some solution to the problems which I had in VS.NET particularly CSS compatibility. I liked the comment of Ezequiel Espíndola too.

Silly. You mention meta tags taking up valuable bits when rendered from the server? Gimme a break, those tags are not even material compared to the damn page view state that is generated on your behalf thanks to crappy webcontrols that everbody seems to abuse - why don't you concentrate on something like using regular input tags and reducing the size of the viewstate or eliminating it all-together, or how about inheriting all your pages from a parent page class and modify the default templates as one astute reader already knew about, or screw it use perl or cgi-scripts - oh wait you wouldnt know about any of that because all you web types are worried about is text formatting only - nevermind what really works. You web types make me laugh with your dream weaver and pretty tools - if you can't do it in emacs, vi or notepad then maybe you should find another career!

i need some Asp form desing Tool,I've starting using your tool and will take the suggestion of altering my default aspx template in VS.NET. I must say that working with CSS rather than Grid Layout or tables all over the place is fairly hard work (I design online mapping tools that have a LOT of buttons, widgets, DHTML), but seems to be worth the efforts. Thanks again.

the problem in asp.net that there is no tamlate engine
same in php we have smarty
mey be soon we might fine asp.net tamplate engines
still master pages can be handy for the current time
peace
:)

This article has confirmed to my decision of doing away with ms_positioning property and other problems... So i could let my team know something.. But i have one problem though... i am not able to make a screen irrespective of client resolution... i need u to pull me out of this .. i do not want to use CSS stuff... i have been able to achieve this for all control in ASp.net by taking out ms_positioning property , postion:absolute and providing a tag for my body.But when i add HTML Table control and aligning to center does not adjust to screeen size... For eg: if i have a label control on top as header and i build a HTML Table control beneath it within which rests a login control namely 2 test boxes and submit button.... in 800*600 i get it properly but when i change it to 1024*768 Label control header adjusts to center of the now larger space... but Table control beneath it maintains almost the same left and does not adjust...
Could u help me out
Thanks

Nice article, thanks. I'm not a fan of the 'default' meta tags either. I liked the rant by "Anon", including the use of viewstate killing performance, it's so very true. As an emacs devotee I feel there is a whole lot of truth to the 'being able to do it in emacs' mantra.

In my opinion, I think these proprietary 'extensions' that are being added are killing productivity. I shouldn't need vs_targetSchema for visual studio to recognize a 'class' attribute or 'link' tag, which are valid html. The bloat of these tools (vs.net sp1 takes 1-1.5 hours to install, what!!?) is extremely counterproductive.