Well, I did a webcast as well on the exact topic as the post title, but quickly to get started, Visual Studio 2008 offers a world of benefits to Web Developers as I have mentioned in the earlier posts.
The first thing that you would notice is probably the Split View Designer. One of the coolest things about Visual Studio 2008 is that it provides Split View Designer which kind of allows you to chose to see both the HTML Markup as well the Design at the same time. There is a history behind this and I would like to brief on that.
It kind of started with earlier versions of Visual Studio (Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003) where you need to switch between Design and HTML to autogenerate the control declaration in the code behind. If you have worked with .NET 1.x versions and Visual Studio .NET 2003, you would know that, you need to explicitly declare the controls defined in the ASPX Webforms in the code behind with a protected void Control ControlID ....
To do that you could switch to Design, Drag and Drop a control and if you switch back to code behind / HTML you would get this control declared automatically in the code behind. This was a handy utility to save manually typing the control reference.
However, with Visual Studio 2005, the need for explicitly declaring the controls in the code behind was removed and even the event handling delegate was removed with the AutoEventWireup enabled by default.
But people still had the habit of switching between HTML, Design and Code behind for two reasons
1. To verify how their control is positioned, color etc.,
2. With the same old style of Visual Studio .NET to generate the code behind reference
Imagine if there are 15 controls in a page added and people switch to a minimum of 10 times and there are around 10 pages. Its going to be 100 times they switch between the HTML Designer and the Code behind / Markup.
With SplitView Designer one can see both the HTML View as well as the Design View and save a number of round trips between the 3 screens.
The coolest thing is that Visual Studio 2008 can also work with earlier versions of .NET Framework viz.. .NET 2.0 and 3.0 and hence the Split View Designer would be available for projects / websites targetting earlier versions as well.
I will write more about Split View as well as other Visual Studio 2008 features in my subsequent posts.
Cheers !!!
posted @ Wednesday, December 05, 2007 10:36 PM