I recently started a new project for work, and been thrown into slightly unfamiliar waters. They want the project done in ASP.net, and on top of that, I have to work on the project in VS 2003 for various reasons. I've handled a lot of .Net stand-alone applications, so I'm familiar with the libraries and languages, and I write a lot of PHP and AJAX, so the web-app side isn't bad either. I'll admit that the method the app takes form with is a bit different in asp.net, but not too bad to get used to. My problem comes with the fact that I'm a notepad coder at heart ;) Truthfully, in some lazyness, I've devolved into using dreamweaver for its autocomplete and save-via-ftp features. But regardless, I'm used to hand coding everything. I can handle things being inserted that look a little funky, and I've changed a few of the editor settings to output html that looks a little nicer to me. What's bugging the bejesus out of me is when visual studio breaks up tags to line wrap them, and crunches tags together to make them fit on one line. Does anyone know an option where this could be changed, like dreamweaver's settings that allow different tags to force a linebreak, and others to stack on one line? Or anyway to turn off the wrapping in the middle of a tag? I'll keep looking in the VS settings for now but any advice would be appreciated!

Quote:Original post by daerid
There is no way currently to turn that option off in VS.NET 2003.

However, what I've found to be successful is that I code everything by hand in Source view, and then when I need to get the controls to show up in the code behind, I do this:

1. Switch To Design View - This will generate the proper designer generated code in the code-behind.
2. Switch Back to Source View
3. Hit Control+Z twice to undo formatting changes that Design View made.

Since I can just hit Control+PageDown to toggle between design and source, it becomes a really quick 4-hit combo.

Nice! At the moment what I'm doing is keeping VS and Dreamweaver open at the same time, and just letting VS make its changes, and then do all my editing in dreamweaver, and having it reformat when I need it.

I took a look at the options in 2005, and there seems to be a lot of the things I'm looking for, and it's actually a half-decent editor (xhtml validation, yay!). I just need to find out why they don't want me to use it and convince them otherwise ;) The little bundled asp server it has would solve a lot of our problems, and it seems to be a lot more friendly about sharing projects with people (we've had some trouble with this).

Thanks for the help though, I'll give this a shot!