my "1st" look at vs2005 and vwd.

well, here i go with my dive into asp.net 2.0. I absolutely loved .net 1.1, esp after my j2ee project, wahaha... lots of cool stuff which make my php frens go "that's cheating!!" well not everything about .net 1.1 was sweet for me... i came from a web designer background in dreamweaver and was very particular about my html code and layout. thing is, vs2003 kept "sync-ing" the HTML source with its own convention (all those MS-POSITIONING thingie) and made my head go bust. so in the end i used sharpdevelop, combo-ed with dreamweaver and CLRDebugger to develop web apps... haha, which was really slowing my progress, but still less troublesome then changing my html code all the time i update something on a form.

vs2005 kept its promise on not sync-ing the HTML wilfully! this was really a saving grace. on this point alone i could switch back to vs, but there are other cool stuff as well. now the designer and source view is click-sync, means the cursor goes to whichever line of html the designer has its focus on... intellisense is everywhere, yippee.

And the new code-behind model using partial classes is splendid! a net1.1 developer using vs2003 might not notice, but using code-behind without vs2003 was nightmare-ish... one side was the benefit of clear design-code separation, but the code-behind files done manually had to declare ALL of the controls used by the webform and kept in sync with any changes. partial class no longer has to account for this, making the code-behind file cleaner.

Other stuff in vs2005 include test server, mssql 2005 express, and so on and so on. well, i wun touch any stuff i am not experienced in... my next dive will be into masterpages, something i frequently used in .net 1.1 via wilson's masterpages, now integrated as a .net standard control :)