visual studio 2008 / asp.net web forms - is hand coding ~80% of the time too much?

Question

I still find myself hand coding Visual Studio projects more than using the variety of UI-driven menus and dialogs. For example:

• web projects: hand code html/css in Source View vs dealing with the Design View / Properties Window
• flushing out class files: code by hand using stuff like the prop-TAB-TAB Create Property keyboard shortcut and good ole Ctrl+[X|C|V] instead of the Class Diagram feature

Do I need to give the dialogs and menus another shot, or is this the current state of IDEs? Intellisense is the best thing since sliced bread IMO.

Steve

Answer 1

I personally hand code html/css as well as my class definitions 99% of the time. Exceptions would be things that would be hard to hand-code otherwise (does anyone hand-code WCF proxies?)

Answer 2

It's all about YOU. What makes YOU more productive. What makes more scenes for YOU.

It's good to know and learn alternative ways to achieve your goal. You can give it try but if it slows you down return to the way YOU used to code.

Answer 3

I certainly find the the UI designer only works for the simplest of pages, and even for them only for a few design iterations. I find this for two reasons

1) When laying out a page, there are often several legitimate choices, and I don't like the choices VS makes. For instance, it will set the width of tables using pixel sizes, while for most fluid pages percentages make more sense. Nothing wrong with what it does, but for whatever reason I find myself fighting it more often than not.

2) It hard-codes a lot of style information, and even creates synthetic styles in an in-page style sheet. I'd rather have a concise and comprehensive CSS for the site as a whole, minimizing overrides on each page (or in each element!). Again, I fight it more often than not.

Answer 4

I am not a .NET programmer, and I understand Visual Studio does provide a lot of nifty code generation tools. However, I think it's rather important that a developer knows the code in his application. If you feel comfortable hand-coding it because you feel more in control that way, I don't think that should bother you at all.

Also, as someone who writes a lot of HTML/CSS by hand, I know that Visual Studio's Design View does not churn out 'quality' front end code a lot of the time.

Answer 5

Well the designer for WPF/Silverlight is pretty cumbersome to use. So I pretty much hand code xaml and C#. At the moment I do not do much asp but with MVC, I would assume I would hand code that.

With visual studio having intellisense for a lot different syntaxes now, it is easier then ever to hand code, well, code. :) I mean intellisense works for C#, CSS, javascript, asp, and XML (if set up right). It is pretty easy to code now days. The youngsters have it so easy now days. They do not know how hard it was to code back in the day.

Answer 6

I'd say it absolutely, 100% depends on what you're writing.

• If it's a basic CRUD interface for a simple database, then I'd say yes, 80% is way too much.

• If it's a Web Application with plenty of JQuery UI and no persistent data source, then 80% is probably less than I'd expect.

As Vadium said, it also depends on what makes you more productive. Personally, I fly along with Intellisense, but I'm not too good on using UI tools to build an app.

Answer 7

I'd be quite content to have Microsoft remove the design view from Visual Studio. I find myself cursing it every time I accidentally hit the button and wait ages for the broken rendering engine to kick in. This is from the perspective of a web developer mind you - I'm sure it's essential for developing windows apps.

Generally I think most of the RAD tools are not particularly useful, and in the long run end up being problematic as they're not very flexible. When developing web forms asp.net applications the listview and repeater are generally the only controls that I use. Hand coding html/css would be the preference for most designers anyway. Tools like Dreamweaver are nice initially when you're learning, but you do get to a stage where you realise you're using them as a glorified text editor.

Intellisense as you mention is utterly bad arse, and the one thing that I would miss if I switched to something like e or Textmate.

Answer 8

I always feel dumber using Visual Studio, but I have to finish my project sometime this century to get paid.