10 August 2004
Visual Studio and Web Standards
It will come as no big surprise to many of you that I am having one major problem with using visual studio .net 2003. And that problem is the way in which it formats my XHTML, or doesn't format it as the case may be.
Microsoft always has this issue, and I am sure there are good reasons for it, so I won't go bashing them this time around. Besides, I have been told that the next version of VS.NET ( Whidbey ) is going to support proper XHTML formatting, with the ability to set the target scheme to which ever DTD you want. I just hope that we don't get a ‘no cigar' scenario.
There is hope
I think that getting VS.NET 2003 to work to the standard I want is going to take a lot of hacking. But I have started finding ways.
One way that I have only started looking into, but shows a lot of potential is building custom web controls . This means that I can control the HTML output of the controls, and even create more functionality that normal default web controls in ASP.net have. I will let you know how I get on with this.
More help please
On my quest to understand just why VS has to work in this way I came across this article . It talks about being able to plug other rendering engines into VS so that the MSHTML.DLL engine doesn't take control over your code. Has anyone else out there had any experience with this? Can you tell me as too whether it is worth the hassle?
- Time: 16:32
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Comments ( 3 )
Chris
Someone beat you to it
Ive done a fair bit of exploring in the whidbey express beta and have yet to find fault in microsoft's implementation of standards, even when it comes to XHTML strict! Needless to say i was quite impressed with this but no doubt they will break it before release.
In the meantime, there is a company who sells these custom controls @ http://www.xhtmlwebcontrols.net. Havnt used them meself but heard they are the business. Of course they could be looking at going out of business with the release of whidbey :)
You really ought to get yourself a copy of the visual web developer express beta from the ms site and give it a shot yourself mate. You can run asp1.1 and asp2.0 on the same machine simultaneously.
Phil Baines
I'll have a look at Whidbey when I get the chance, but things are very busy here. Don't get much R&D time any more, each project itself becomes the chance to learn something new.
Those xhtml web controls look interesting. Some ones made a bit of money out of them. I would imagine that they could still make money out of control development if they produce good controls with more functionality than you get with standard controls.
Maybe if they did a definitionList control. That could be cool. I might do that myself.
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