We're finally working on a project at work that's just for us. We don't have to worry about satisfying someone else or conforming to their deadlines. This gives us a bit more time to play around. With our extra time, i thought this would be a good project to do everything in .NET. We've been messing around with it for quite a while now and this gives a good opportunity to learn how to take advantage of all that ASP.NET has to offer.
It was fun designing classes, implementing interfaces, declaring data types, and all that. The most annoying thing so far is Visual Studio 2003. Like most web publishing software, it gives you an option of putting your page together visually or just programming the raw HTML. The problem is that one trip to design view reformats your HTML code. It get mangled by random tag capitalization, inconsistent indentation, and dropping closing tags (oh, my poor dl list!) resulting in code that won't validate and looks embarrassing.
This is nothing new to Microsoft HTML editors. Frontpage was awful but back then we didn't care as much. We've been using Visual InterDev 6.0 for a while and i just got accustomed to never using design mode. I can do the same for VS2003 but i was hoping i wouldn't have to. Design mode makes quick work of doing the linking from the aspx page to its codebehind and setting up datasets and whatnot; but i guess i'll have to do that by hand. It's frustrating that Microsoft programmers have acknowledged the problem but it's still around. Apparently the next version (VS2005) will fix that, but i'm programming now. You would think IDE's would, above all else, pledge to do no harm to code.
Posted by Matthew at October 2, 2004 07:10 PM