[MonoDevelop] asp.net designer idea

[Thiago Milczarek Sayão]

Hello folks,

Ive been thinking about an asp.net designer for MD. Firstly i was
thinking about something similar to webmatrix or vs.net. But their
designer is not good for the following reason:

	It does not encorage asp.net programmers to do it in a OO way. The java
approach makes developers to extend the taglib add the needed
functionality to it and then use it. This approach is totally possible
in asp.net and makes the code much more organized and clean, and more
OO. The webmatrix and vs.net approach makes the user design the visual
on a procedural way, with the default component tags.

So in resume, webmatrix and vs.net encourages you to do the things this
way:

(imagine a table used for the site design)

<table id="blah" ...>
<tr>
<td> (content) </td>
</tr>
</table>


The idea is to have something like this:

<design>
 (content)
</design>


Got the point of the idea ?

So, the idea is to have a split window (like that MD screenshot  
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/tberman/archives/MonoDevelop-SidebySide.png)

The first area contains a text editor, and the second area a preview,
that connects to xsp and displays the page that was being edited on the
text editor. The second area would contain a refresh button that would
refresh the preview area. Of course, we want it to be easy to edit, so a
toolbox would be provided with drag and drop to the editor area. We can
use more "tricks" to make it easy to edit, like code completion,
property windows, making it easy to add custom components to the
toolbox, etc.

This way, users/developers are encouraged to write custom components
that extends the default ones in a beautiful and organized OO way :)

Of course, we still have to think in more ways to make the editor very
easy and pleasurable to edit. Pleasurable is the right word, because we
developers hate doing boring and repetitive things, dont we ? :)

Big Hug,
Thiago Sayao.