[MonoDevelop] Webpage Designer View

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Paulo J. Matos <pocm at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>> A designer does exist (http://www.mono-project.com/AspNetEdit) and it
>> can be built against current MD SVN. However, I haven't worked on it
>> for a long time and it's still pretty feature-incomplete. Instead I've
>> been prioritising code completion / text editing features, and I feel
>> that those are more useful (and easier to make useable).
>>
>
> I understand that but if you say other things would be more useful
> it's because in general people have alternatives to that. Which
> alternatives are used?

* It takes a lot of resources to write a *good* visual web designer of
any kind, especially if you want good markup to be generated. NVU and
the other free visual editors frankly don't come close to DreamWeaver
and Expression Web, which both have large teams and years of
development behind them.

* Even people who use visual designers want to view the source, which
is why split code/designer views are so useful popular. Visual
designers are useful for quickly putting things together, but for
serious development, a good text editor is much more useful.

*  Code completion features can be added bit by bit, and the editor's
still useful.But if a visual designer isn't feature-complete, then
it's unusable for some tasks.

* The bar is much lower for making a text editor useful.

Here's are screenshots of some of the features I've already implemented:
http://mjhutchinson.com/files/images/MonoScreenshots/AspNetCodeFolding.png
http://mjhutchinson.com/files/images/MonoScreenshots/AspNetCCPeek.png

> Or should I assume nobody uses mono for its ASP.NET capabilities?

*Mono* ASP.NET support is very good. Please don't confuse Mono and
Monodevelop in this way. Note that you *can* run ASP.NET apps on Mono
after developing them on Windows, so you can use VWD if you have
Windows.

I'm trying to make is easier to *write* ASP.NET apps on Linux, but I
have a finite amount of time. Given this, I believe that the current
path I'm taking gets the best benefit for serious users.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com