I’m struggling with a few in-house developers that are creating some web apps in VS 2008 using C#.
It appears that the native tools and components in VS 2008 are not being nice about creating Web Standard code.
For example, the navigation component creates items in its own table structure.
Is there anyway to make a web project from Visual Studio create nice, clean, browser friendly code?
You can use CSS Friendly Control Adapters to alter the output of the current ASP.NET controls. It’s easy to set up and you don’t have to change any existing source code.
If you’re bound to ASP.NET WinForms, you could create you own set of controls or use 3rd party controls. There is also a XHTML configuration setting you could set to Strict, so that the controls try to render more valid core.
When you really want to write nice, clean, browser friendly code, you could take a look at ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC gives you complete control of the output, but that means you have to do all the things WinForms currently does for you, yourself…