Getting disenchanted with Whidbey master pages

I've just started doing some non-trivial stuff with Master Pages in Whidbey, and I'm already hitting some of their annoying limitations. Things that I've hit in just the last hour are:
  • Nesting master pages disables the design view. That's right, as soon as you start nesting master pages, you're limited to the HTML code view (in both your master and content pages). That's such a major limitation that it's hard to believe MS even claims nested masters as a feature.
  • ContentPlaceHolder controls render themselves as gigantic block elements in the designer, which can not be resized in any way. Essentially that limits their use to defining large regions on the page - forget about using content placeholders in small, precisely positioned regions in a title bar, for example (at least if you want any kind of decent designer experience).
Both of these problems have been reported already on Ladybug, with the predictable response - not going to be fixed. Grrrr..

UPDATE - Scott Guthrie comments that that ContentPlaceHolder's will fill their container, and so it's size can be controlled by placing it in a fixed-size container. Unfortunately, that's not the behavior I'm seeing with the Feb CTP - perhaps it's a bug. Also, if you want to design around the natural size of the content, the fill behavior is problematic.

7 Comments

  • The design view is pretty useless anyway...it always screws up your html formatting and is therefore best avoided.



    Has the reformatting bug been fixed in Whidbey?

  • Yes, the designer reformatting problems have been fixed in Whidbey.

  • The content placeholders will fill up the container they are placed within. So if you drop them on a vanilla page they will fill up the entire region. But if you drop them within a table cell with a fixed width, or if you prefer CSS a layer, then you can constrain the size in the desinger to be exactly what you want. I have seen some pages that have 50+ content placeholders on them open up within the designer.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott



    P.S. Nested master pages not being in the designer does indeed suck, but was a limitation we had to-do to get everything else done. We will be enabling this in the next version. Note that intellisense for nested master pages in source mode is fully supported.

  • Solution seems simple: get out of design view :)



    I dunno, but I've always preferred looking at lines of code/markup than looking at property panes/windows. For that reason, BizTalk annoys the hell out of me. It's a nice concept, but hard to really understand what the hell is going, especially if you're looking at someone else's orchastration.



    Myself? I only use the design view to auto-populate the object declarations in the code and of course I always hit Ctrl+S in my source a few times for a good measure before I switch to design view as the design view is sure to scramble my pristine markup. Other than that, I'd say the design view is pretty useless.

  • Design view won't change your markup anymore.

  • Yeah, I don't see design view as helpful anyway. Maybe for RAD, but I don't think any designer will every be able to have fine-grained control that you can do with the markup directly.

  • Well 5 years later and it's still not fun to work with when trying to upgrade page UIs quickly. Particularly if they contain grid/repeater controls.

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