Question

Looking for some direction here as I’m running into some migration problems.

We have a legacy application. The ‘infrastructure’ is running just fine. Business logic and data access layers written in VB calling SQL Server for the database.

I have a LOT of experience writing Winforms (desktop) application and have had no problems. However, the last time I wrote any ASP.NET stuff was in 1.1 (VS.NET 2003).

Among other things, for ASP.NET 2.0 and up, the Grid layout is gone. It’s not just a simple case of dropping controls on a form, aligning them, ordering them and working with the code-behind anymore.

The new web-based application is starting out pretty simple. Just a common header (already made a user control for that) and footer with your typical CRUD functions in the middle.

I tried being ‘intuative’ in using a master page with content place holders but I couldn’t get the placeholders to ‘grow’, to say nothing of not being able to put a text box where I wanted one. Oh, I found the option in VS2008 to allow absolute positioning but it only worked for SOME controls – others I had to manually edit the asp tags.

Then I saw examples using div’s and tried to implement them but I ended up with results that had objects writing on top of each other. The online help wasn’t helpful to say the least.

Does anyone know of a good book, website or tutorial that can give the basics of what I’m looking for? In practice, I’m looking to make simple pages where some objects may have to push others gurther down the y-axis (as in, several comments being made and that section would push the section listing the ‘attachments’ down further). I have no trouble when it comes to all the other aspects of this application. It just appears that my webforms skills are about 3-4 years out of date.

This isn’t going to be some fancy flash/silverlight application – just simple ‘data maintenance’ to get rid of some ugly and bug-prone processes involving reading common mailboxes and decoding Word files. The new goal is to have a nice weborm with proper validation.

I guess what I’m looking for is a ‘Webforms for Winforms programmers’ book or site.

Help!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The best advice I’ve heard on learning to use html/css layout goes something like this:

When building a new page, don’t try to get all fancy up front. Start by building a very basic, text-only page. It should look like something from 1996- that brief period where everyone had just discovered the web but had not yet started using the table tag for layout- only no comic sans font. Don’t use images at this point, unless the image is genuinely a part of the information being conveyed (as opposed to the window dressing to make it look pretty: you can add those later). There will likely be an h1 at the top of the page, and give each sub heading an appropriate hN, but at this point there shouldn’t be any layout information in the page at all. The only place you’ll have a table tag is if you genuinely have tabular data to show. If it helps you write this code then you can wrap everything in old-fashioned <center> tags for now- just don’t forget to remove them later.

Now let’s start tweaking the markup a little. Use things like ul (unordered list) for your list of navigation links and label/legend to identify and group your form areas. The general idea here is to have each element on the page encased in the most appropriate html tag, and to use the full set of available tags- each for it’s designated purpose.

At this point you have a page that is ideally suited for a screen reader or search engine. By building this page first, you have made SEO and accessibility compliance easy on yourself. Of course those aren’t the only requirements, so we’re not done yet.

Now you need to identify the different sections of your page, from both the layout and logical perspectives. The page should largely already be divided logically, but you may find a few places where the normal tags don’t cut it. You’ll also want to group certain elements for layout reasons. Encase each of these areas with a div tag, and give the tag a class name that refers to the purpose for the tag: the group your are creating. This is just another case of using the a tag (the ‘division’ tag) for it’s intended purpose. Also, since elements can have more than one class, you may want to think about also grouping your classes logically. For example, you might want to have a separate class that distinguishes the site template from the rest of the page.

By and large this should not have changed the appearance of the page, but now you have something where it should be very easy to start adding styles. At this point you can now start adding images and layout. The goal here, though, is to change the actual markup as little as possible. If you can manage it only add ids and classes, though you will likely need to add an additional span or div that you had not identified earlier, and sometimes you’ll need an extra block level element to force a compatible layout across browsers.

If things are done correctly, the result is a page that not only looks good, but is also easier to work with when testing across browsers, will naturally degrade well when a style or javascript feature isn’t supported, and scores well for SEO and accessibility. This also makes it easier to have a developer build a simple page that provides a certain level of functionality, which they can this pass off to a separate designer to make it look good.