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Asked: 2026-05-25T12:50:30+00:00

we are in process of switching our ASP.Net development from Visual Studio 2003 and

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we are in process of switching our ASP.Net development from Visual Studio 2003 and .Net 1.1 to Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 3.5. So far, we successfully migrated our back end code and after some fight the ASP.Net front end code too. While the work on the back end code resumed with usual productivity, working on the ASP.Net front end code is massively hampered because of following issues:

  • The Visual Studio 2010 Web Designer crashes frequently (e. g. after using the “Undo” function) – we are used to the stability problems of Visual Studio 2003 Web Designer when working with large web forms, but the new Web Designer crashes frequently even with trivial web forms. Is there anything to make the thing stable? ServicePack 1 brought no help.

  • When adding new controls to a webform in the web designer, the declaration of the new control will never automatically propagate to the code behind page in the migrated web form. New web forms created from scratch seem to work ok. The migrated web forms maintain the old file structure (aspx, aspx.cs and aspx.resx), while the new web forms get a new file structure (aspx, aspx.cs and aspx.designer.cs. Recreating all the existing web forms manually to get the new file structure would be a very painful operation. Is there a way to make the old decent working propagation of controls’ declaration to code behind file work in Visual Studio 2010 too?

  • (Currently our biggest problem): when designing a web form, we basically put the textboxes, labels, buttons etc. in a div with ms_positioning=”GridLayout”. We define absolute coordinates for every control in the div. This doesnot seem to work properly in Visual Studio 2010. With a lot of effort we can somehow continue using this approach, but adding a new button or textbox to a web form means massive effort now. Without paying really much attention it can even result in overwritig of the css-classes-file (the Web Designer sometimes decides to write the coordinates not in the aspx file but in the css file). I read recently that using absolute coordinates to position stuff on a web page is a very bad and deprecated approach. I tend to believe it seeing how gruesome it has to be done in the new Visual Studio. But what is the correct way to create winforms-like web forms rapidly? (With rapidly I mean simple drag-drop-point-click way of designing stuff).

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best Regards
Erich Horak

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ll try to tackle this issue by issue:

    Designer

    Unfortunately, the new designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been plagued with issues. With 2010, the editor was completely revamped with WPF, which was supposed to make it faster, but thus far has seemed inferior to the previous editors. There are some improvements, but if I had an option to choose I would stick with the old editor, at least until the issues are worked out with the new one. It may not be any consolation, but you are not the only one feeling that pain.

    Adding controls/new page file structure

    Again, this is another situation where migration will prove painful. If I were to suggest an approach, I would copy paste the markup into newly created forms (created w/ VS 2010). The designer.cs file should register the controls. You might run into issues with event handler mappings, but hopefully it won’t get in the way of the designer.cs file registering the controls. I know this is a painful prospect, but you have to keep in mind that you’re moving up several versions.

    Designer view & absolute positioning

    While you’re migrating the system, you might want to set the default view to source-view, so you can paste the HTML onto the page. You can do this by going to Tools > Options > HTML Designer > General. Honestly, in my opinion, the designer is really flaky and should be avoided. The HTML it produces really is horrible.

    Using absolute coordinates to position elements on a page is a deprecated approach for sure, but if your goal at this point is to get your migration working, then don’t worry about it for now. Eventually, it would be a good idea to refactor your HTML and CSS to use more modern techniques, but if the current code-base is browser-compatible, then leave it for now.

    It may not seem like it at first, but if you can move away from the designer and use the source view, you won’t regret it. It does take a little more time at first, but having control over the markup will end up saving you a lot of time in the long run. If the designer is allowed to run rampant throughout the system, it will screw things up. By using the source view, you have full control over everything that’s happening, which will become a huge advantage. By leveraging new features like master pages, you can move just as quickly in the source-code view as in the designer view of 1.1. I started out with the designer-view myself in 1.1, but after switching to the source-view, I never looked back again. You really do make up the productivity in other ways.

    I wish I could give you a “do this and everything will snap into place” kind of answer, but I think you’re in for a painful conversion process. The good news is, once it’s done you can start utilizing all of the new features that have come around in the past 8 years. 😉

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