Visual studio 2008 / asp.net web forms - is it hand coding ~ 80% of the time too much?
I still find that I manually code Visual Studio projects more than using the various UI driven menus and dialogs. For instance:
- web projects: manual html / css code in source view and working with view / design properties window
- cleaning up class files: code by hand using stuff like the command line prop-TAB-TAB Create Property and a nice ole Ctrl + [X | C | V] instead of the Class Diagram function
Do I need to show dialogs and menus, or is this the current state of the IDE? Intellisense is the best thing as sliced bread IMO.
Steve
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I'd be happy if Microsoft will remove the Design View from Visual Studio. I find myself cursing him every time I accidentally press the button and wait for the time for the broken render engine to explode. This is from a web developer's point of view, what do you think - I'm sure this is important for developing Windows applications.
Overall, I think most RAD tools are not particularly useful and they end up being problematic as they are not very flexible. When developing web forms for asp.net applications, the list and repeater are usually the only controls I use. Hand coding html / css would be preferable for most designers. Tools like Dreamweaver are fine initially when you're learning, but you get to the stage where you realize you're using them as a glorified text editor.
Intellisense is, as you mention, a completely bad ass and the only thing I would miss if I switched to something like e or Textmate.
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I am not a .NET programmer and I understand that Visual Studio provides a lot of great code generation tools. However, I think it is quite important that the developer knows the code in their application. If you feel comfortable hand-coding because you feel more confident about it, I don't think that should bother you at all.
Also, like someone who writes a lot of HTML / CSS by hand, I know that Visual Studio Design View doesn't change the quality code too often.
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I'm sure the UI designer only works for the most basic pages and even for them only for a few design iterations. I find this for two reasons.
1) There are often multiple legitimate options when hosting a page and I don't like VS options. For example, it will set table widths using pixel sizes, while for most liquid pages, percentages make more sense. Nothing wrong with what he does, but for some reason I struggle with her more often.
2) It hardcodes a lot of style information and even creates synthetic styles in the stylesheet on the page. I would prefer to provide concise and comprehensive CSS for the site as a whole, minimizing overrides on every page (or every element!). Again, I fight him more often than not.
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Well, the designer for WPF / Silverlight is pretty cumbersome to use. So I have pretty much manual xaml and c # code. I don't do a lot of asp at the moment, but with MVC, I would guess that I would pipe the code.
With visual studio having intellisense for many different syntaxes, it is now easier than ever to pass code, well, code. :) I mean intellisense works for C #, CSS, javascript, asp and XML (if configured correctly ). It's pretty easy to code days now. It's so easy for young people now. They don't know how hard it was to do it that day.
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I would say that absolutely, 100% depends on what you write.
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If this is a basic CRUD interface for a simple database, then I would say yes, 80% is too much.
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If this is a web app with lots of jQuery UI and a persistent data source, then 80% is probably less than I expected.
As Vadim said, it also depends on what makes you more productive. Personally, I fly with Intellisense, but I am not very good at using UI tools to build an app.
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