Am I the only one who doesn't use Visual Studio designer for webforms?
Literally the only time I use it is to drag and drop a user control on the screen (which I think cut and paste to the correct location).
Other than that, what good is the designer?
I also hate any declarative tag programming, so that might explain it (all code-behind for me).
With you all the way. Practically never use the designer mode. And reluctant about putting C# in aspx. I don't think we are alone in this. Happy to welcome more declarative programming but so long as that what's it is designed for, e.g. xaml.
I've never used the designer either. I used to back in 2003 to put user controls on my pages, but I don't even do that anymore. Sometimes it just takes TOO long to load everything in the designer. I prefer to handcode it all. mm mm. I did try to make an attempt at split screen when 2008 beta came out, but even that was sluggish and unresponsive. The same with the new feature of css integration they touted, I found it horribly time-inefficient. Keyboard ftw!
I actually spend as much time as possible avoiding it, as it reformats my html most of the time.
It wasn't until recently that I actually started using VS.Net for any html editing. And I still find myself going back to my trusty notepad.
I just type in the code for controls, and skip the designer all together.
The only time I've used it in the last 3 years was to generate local resource files in Visual Studio 2005 - it could only be done through the designer view.
In VS 2003, the designer was criminally unusable - a complete lack of understanding of whitespace, crappy HTML, and it would reformat things almost at random. In 2005, it got a bit better, but it's slow and still mostly unfriendly, although it doesn't seem to mess with the whitespace as much. I've played a bit with VS2008, but I've developed the habit of using the text view.
So the answer is no, I don't use the designer. To answer the question, the only thing it seems to be good for (in the later versions, anyways) is to set properties via some of the built-in wizards. (I will admit to using it to construct db connection strings for a new database, but then it's right back to text mode!)
for very simple pages, i use the designer almost exclusively, and let the stylesheet make it look nice
for more complex pages, i use the designer to drag and drop the controls that i want onto the design surface at the start, then switch to the text view for fine-grained control
and i don't like the html re-wrapping either
I pretty much only use Visual Studio for prototyping and for debugging.
And I too have found I hate declarative tag programming (both ASP.NET and XAML). I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it, I just prefer creating my DOM or WPF Visual Tree in code. I think better that way.
There is nothing wrong with using the designer. Of course you MUST know what is going on behind the scenes. I usually switch to the design view when dropping user controls and also when attaching events of some of the heavy controls like GridView, FormView, DetailsView etc.
I think it's personal choice whether you wish to use the designer or not. I use the designer now and then to get a look at the layout of the form I am making. Most of the time my form is in split mode, and when I want to work on the Source, I go to the source mode.
I don't think there's any reason not to work with the designer if you want to,
I feel you are not alone in the source view... I think the question is: is anybody using the designer view?
;)