Professional Visual Studio® 2008

32.3. Designing Web Forms

One of the biggest areas of improvement in Visual Studio 2008 for web developers is the visual design of web applications. The HTML Designer has been overhauled with a new split view that enables you to simultaneously work on the design and markup of a web form. You can also change the positioning, padding, and margins in Design view, using visual layout tools. Finally, Visual Studio 2008 now supports rich Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) editing tools for designing the layout and styling of web content.

32.3.1. The HTML Designer

The HTML Designer in Visual Studio has always been one of the reasons it is so easy to develop ASP.NET applications. Because it understands how to render HTML as well as server-side ASP.NET controls, you can simply drag and drop components from the Toolbox onto the designer surface in order to quickly build up a web user interface. You can also quickly toggle between viewing the HTML markup and the visual design of a web page or user control.

The modifications made to the View menu of the IDE are a great example of what Visual Studio does to contextually provide you with useful features depending on what you're doing. When you're editing a web page in Design view, additional menu commands become available for adjusting how the design surface appears (see Figure 32-6).

Figure 32.6. Figure 32-6

The three sub-menus at the top of the ...