How often do ASP.NET developers NOT use Visual Studio design mode?

Question

We are developing an ASP.NET application. We retained an outside UI design firm, and for the most part have been very pleased with their work. Their "deliverable" to us was clickable screens -- Visual Studio solutions with ASPX files, images, master pages, etc. The screens were not connected to any data source. They had dummy data so that we could see how the UI worked.

One problem we've run into is that our developers are used to using Visual Studio design mode. The pages we receive from the UI firm have problems sometimes when we pull them up into design mode. The consultant's developers coded these screens without using design mode.

We assumed they'd be using design mode, but this wasn't specified in the contract. Was this too much to assume? Is there a lot of ASP.NET development work that never goes through VS design mode?

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Third party edit:

Suggestion: people responding to this question should specify which version of Visual Studio they're using, as Microsoft trashed the code base that was in the VS2005 and earlier designers, and replaced it with the one they purchased when they purchased the Expression products. The two are totally unrelated, and the new one is far better. - John Saunders

Answer 1

The more and more you work with Visual Studio, the less and less you rely on Design Mode. Complicated UIs tend to make the design view look atrocious.

Answer 2

I (and peers) never use Design Mode, for two reasons:

• I learnt in VS 2003 not to touch Design Mode because your HTML was managled by VS. (Not anymore though since 2008, but once bitten ...)

• It can take ages to render.

Much quicker to drag-drop from toolbox and hand-code.

Answer 3

I actually find that ASP.NET developers that do use the designer to be quite rare. The Visual Studio designer is notoriously bad at generating clean markup.

Answer 4

I never use design mode, probably because it used to mess my markup so much. Plus I do a lot of dynamic rendering, so there is no point. And I use exclusively CSS for formatting, I don't want VS messing around.

Answer 5

Many never use it, because of bad past experiences. I have found little trouble with Design mode in VS2008, when using modern controls, which are up to date and have good designer support.

On the other hand, because of the earlier problems, a lot of custom server controls do not have good designer support, so are much less useful in design mode now that the earlier designer code base has been replaced with a good one.

Answer 6

I almost never use design mode. It typically creates ugly HTML, and call me anal, but I really like to have clean HTML. If that means hand-coding it, so be it.

Answer 7

I prefer doing it manually, I like to have control.

If I want to look at the result, F5.

Answer 8

I almost never use design mode. For me, the biggest reason is because I learned web design/development in Notepad, so I was used to (and comfortable) working with code. Design mode makes me uncomfortable because I'm never sure exactly what decisions VS will make with regard to HTML, etc. Additionally, I can't imagine that a developer would learn nearly as much about ASP.NET and VB/C# using design mode.

The only time I use design mode is to automatically configure a GridView or something like that like.

Answer 9

Design Mode is taking quite a beating here, but let me point out that it is great for learning about new controls. When you are new to ASP.NET, or are using a new library of controls, Design Mode is a godsend for two reasons:

1. You can modify properties on the Property Editor and see them reflected immediately. This is particularly true for list-container type controls, where the entire layout may depend on one property. Running your application five times to see all five layouts is very tedious.
2. Controls with complex behavior (and lets face it, thats why you're using a control, right?) often have a lot of configuration built into their Smart Tags. Notice the little [>] arrow in the top right of the control? Click it. It'll probably help you out big time. This is particularly true for configuring DataSources, whose syntax is very meticulous.

When I was first learning to use Telerik controls, I relied heavily on the Smart Tags they provide, which are very robust and complete. From that, you can see what kind of ASPX markup is generated and learn to work outside of Design Mode. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy, so I much prefer this approach to looking at the documentation when using something for the first time.

Answer 10

I'm using VS2008, and I never use the design view. I find the code view to just be easier and more responsive than the designer.

Answer 11

Y'know, I never even realised I use the source screens 100% of the time. I usually develop in VS2005.

Whenever I do actually open the design mode, it's by accident, and I try and hit the source view before it renders. I've never been impressed with the design mode, and find it slow as well as adding a lot of unnecessary markup. I also find that intellisense and the properties window mean that I don't need a GUI to develop.

The design mode can also be a nightmare when you're trying to add any nested items. Because we've been developing for a customer using IE6 we've been using tables for formatting so we don't need different DIV definitions. Just clicking in an empty cell can be difficult, and resizing a column can take far too long.

For things like Template Fields in grids, I don't even know how I'd go about setting this up in design view!

Having said that, design mode every time for windows apps!

Answer 12

Design mode is getting better and I'd say that it's likely to become more prevalent as time goes on and the design mode tools continue to improve. I design all my components for design mode, but I still do the large majority of my code by hand - it allows greater control of code layout and doesn't end up creating an auto-formatted mess that I then have to dig through to figure out what changes need making. I know that in future my components are likely going to be used by developers that do most of their design by drag/drop and it's easier to cater for that now than have to come back and do it after the event.

Answer 13

Granted I'm doing MVC stuff, but I never use it - I "grew up" with PHP and code editors, and it still does me just fine.

Answer 14

I'm using two different versions of .NET (2003 & 2005). Some of the forms that were written in 2003 can no longer be edited in 2003 and the installation requires that they be maintained in 2003, so I use KEDIT to edit those forms. Some of the forms in one application are too big for the .NET editor and I prefer a strong editor anyway.

Answer 15

I have no problem working in design mode. One exception is asp:Repeaters, which are not supported, or GridViews which tend to override my manual column definitions.

The other is if VS tries to do a full project scan if I rename a control, and then fails.

Answer 16

We primarily use the code view. The design mode is quite buggy we've found in VS 2008. XML controls tend to barf random character sets out for some reason, and VS will generally run slow whilst trying to render everything on screen. I mainly use the code-view.

Answer 17

Traditionally WYSIWYG designers produced poor code and render CSS and #INCLUDEd files poorly so they were of limited use, so developers tended to code by hand. In addition, these tools allowed you to go a certain distance without real knowledge of what you were doing, which was fine for web tutorials and personal homepages, but as soon as you wanted an extra degree of control you became unstuck - when meant you had to resort to looking 'under the hood' anyway.

Although tools have improved over time, many developers are so comfortable with hand-coding that they all but forget about the Design View - I certainly can't remember last time I used it. I'm sure there are a number of situations where such tools could be genuinely useful, but we are doing fine without and don't want to be bothered with figuring when & where such features can best be used.

Answer 18

Our UI is complicated and it is impossible for us to use design mode with VS2005.

The only time I have touched design mode is to do a quick and dirty prototype or an internal app.

How often do I not use design mode? 99% of the time.