Where I work we use Visual Studio for the development of our main product application as well as various web and support applications. As these developments rely on a number of MS and third party controls the code is pretty tied to Visual Studio as an editing environment and editing it in another tool generaly breaks stuff. (The other developers don't like that!)

So here's my problem (and the reason Visual studio sucks…). It's a tool for developers, and I mean ONLY developers! Microsoft in there infinate FrontPage induced wisdom decided to include a "Design" view… erm, no… design view it ain't! Now I understand it would be harder to market if they called it what it was… a "useless misrepresentitive F$#@ up your code" view but that's exactly what it is! I mean seriously…

First let me make it clear, I'm a web developer, so we're talking ASP.NET here… Visual studio may do an admirable job with Windows forms (note I say "may") but I don't care, it does a piss poor job with ASP.NET so why try? So far, and I'm damn sure there's more, Visual Studio's "Design" view has reformatted/rewritten large chunks of my standards compliant code, changed lower case tags to upper case and get this… removed closing tags! WTF!!! The result? It actually breaks things!

Problem is, and I have looked, I can't seem to find any kind of configuration setting that will prevent it from doing all of this. I know I know… don't use design view… well I don't! but other developers who occationally work with my code DO! And that's not the point… if it doesn't work it shouldn't be there!

Having come from a graphic/web design background I have used Macromedia Dreamweaver, since about version 2 and although it has been an offender itself in the past it has matured into a very capable editor that has some real smarts and know's when to leave your code alone! It's handy to have a design view that works… including the ability to include live dynamic data in pages during editing and view fully representative CSS layout. That said, I rarely use the WYSIWYG design view, preferring to write my own code but at least I know it won't destroy hours of my work at the press of a button!

Having looked into the problem a little however, it seems there is no easy way to work in any other application so long as the primary development environment is Visual Studio so for now I guess I'm stuck with it. So if anyone can shed any light on this or offer up viable solutions please feel free to comment.

Roll on Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0… and Microsoft… PLEASE get it right this time!