I've been pretty pleased with the improvements in the Visual Studio Web designer. There are a lot of things that make life a lot easier including split view, fast mode switching between the designer and the markup editor and all of the CSS improvements that are accessible on both surfaces.
However, there are also what appear to be a few issues I've run into:
Designer and Property Sheet Linkup
It looks like the problem of the property sheet not synching properly in the designer is back in VS 2008. What I see is that if I have a form up and point at a control in the visual designer it takes 4-5 seconds to sync the Property Sheet to the control for the first control and then maybe 2-3 seconds for any further selections. It's very odd behavior - you move to another control with the property sheet active and a few seconds later the property sheet syncs up. It's like a slow aunt arriving a bit late for a party <s>...
I noticed that the behavior is somewhat intermittent and I *think* it's once again related to a mouse latency/idle state monitoring. I use a Microsoft Laser Mouse and with it the behavior is consistent. If I use my laptop's mouse pad instead it appears the control syncing snaps into place properly and once it goes both the mousepad and the laser mouse sync properly.
I had a similar issue some time ago with the HID drivers on XP and Vista which caused problems with Intellisense in the ASP.NET markup editor and this appears similar. Once it 'snaps' clicking on a control syncs immediately but something is causing the syncing to hang.
Fix those wait states in the designer and markup editor please. This has been going on for eons and it's a huge time sink as a few seconds here and there add up quickly in the course of the day!
Slow Designer Startup
Speaking of slowness the designers are very, very slow in starting up for the first time. Granted once the first load has gone by both the visual editor and the markup editors are much more responsive especially when toggling back and forth, but initial startup time even for very simple form is close to 30 seconds for me. That's way too freaking long to look at a fade to blue screen...
<form> Tag Repositioning
It looks like the designer in VS 2008 is back to hacking markup to some extent. I ran into an issue where the designer is moving <form> tags always to before the first control definition even if a <form> tag exists in a previous location in the page. So if you markup like this:
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Test.aspx.cs" Inherits="Test" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label>
<div>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
Input: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Width="386px"></asp:TextBox><br />
</form>
</div>
</body>
</html>
and then you add another control with the designer after the textbox, the <form> tag will be moved to the top of the content:
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Test.aspx.cs" Inherits="Test" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label>
<div>
Input: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Width="386px"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" />
<br />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
It gets worse if you have some specialized controls that sit outside of the HTML content which results in the form tag moved out of the HTML document completely. If you have no <form> tag at all and you drop a non-postback control like a label or literal, a <form> tag also auto adds. If you have a client form in the page like this:
<body>
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label>
<form id="searchForm">
Search: <input type="text" id="searchText" name="searchText" />
</form>
<div>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
Input: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Width="386px"></asp:TextBox><br />
</form>
</div>
</body>
Visual Studio will kindly offer to convert the form to a server form for you - in which case the client form is edited out. Or you can say no and abort which leaves you to do this manually.
This really bites IMHO. I can sort of understand adding a form tag if one's required (ie any control that implements any of the Postback interfaces) and not on the page already, but moving the tag? Why is that necessary?
Step away from the markup that's already there UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. Please!!!
Control Resizing Not Working in some Cases
For some reason I have several forms where control resizing is not working. There are a couple of custom controls (TextBox subclasses) that do nothing special but they will not resize. They have drag handles, and they can be moved but they can't be resized. Same forms work fine in VS 2005, but they don't resize in VS 2008.
I have several forms that do this, but I can't quite seem to figure out what the problem is with these forms. I can 'fix' this by dragging a new control on the form, resizing it and THEN I can resize the original controls as well.
No big deal but certainly very, very odd.
What happened to Multiple Designer Selections?
I may be missing something, but it looks to me that you no longer can make multiple selections with Shift-Click in the visual designer. I don't use the designer very much - which is why I haven't noticed this before I suppose - but this is one reason I occasionally use it for: To resize a whole bunch of controls at one time.
It doesn't look like it's working. I was looking through all the options but I'm not seeing anything that enables/disables this including the options on the Tools dialog and the View menu (if you find different behavior check the Visual Aids options on the View menu which let you customize a few changed designer settings).
Extenders in the Markup Designer
There have been a number of improvements in the markup editor and property sheet operation in VIsual Studio 2008 which is cool. Unfortunately one feature I was hoping for that I still use the visual designer extensively (ha ha) for, are extender properties. I have several extender controls I use but these can't be used in the markup designer unless I want to manually add collection items into the separate extender control.
The real bummer about this is that you CAN DO get everything I wish for in the markup editor, but only after you've activated the visual designer for the page first. Until you do, the PropertySheet settings available to markup text is minimal and certainly doesn't include extender properties. Given the slowness of loading forms for the first time it would be nice if the full property sheet synching was available even if the designer hasn't been activated yet.
Here's the view for pure markup vs. once the designer was active in markup:
The latter gives full view of the properties while only base properties are available in the original markup view before the designer was activated. It sure would be nice if we could get the latter view automatically. OTOH, with the designer switching much faster now once the initial designer loads I suppose it's not too big of a deal to press Shift F7 to switch into design view and back.
Oh wait - Shift F7 in the designer doesn't work and doesn't switch back to the markup editor either because of the single key binding for both View Markup and View Designer. Ah yes, fixing VS key bindings is an attempt in futility.
None of these are big problems (except the <form> issue which is causing me some serious problems with one of my tools), but I really wish Microsoft would have provided a more rigorous post-Beta 2 public release cycle to iron out these little issues. I sure hope SP1 of VS 2008 will show up a lot sooner than the very late VS 2005 SP1 release.