Hello,

I have extensive windows application development and always see my forms as I design them.

Started ASP.net and thought the I could use the wyswyg designer of VS2005 for ASP just the same way.

However, working on the BeerHouse, I was a bit puzzled that the template.master would not resemble at all the web site template from 'template monster' used by the author.

And I checked from downloaded code that this is correct.

Can anyone please help me to try to understand this, but I admit that I am still on Chap 1 and this is really bugging me !!

thank you all.

I don't understand the question. Marco had to make serious changes to the template in order to adapt it to ASP.NET's master page model. He only really wanted their artwork. Most of us developers are not particularly artistic.

Also, the web and windows development paradigms are quite different. I strongly recommend that you get a better intro book on ASP.NET. There really is no WYSIWYG development on the web, even though that is a desirable goal. You simply can't get an accurate rendering at design time that includes the same kind of drag-and-drop ease of layout offered by the windows model. Maybe someday it will be that easy, but not today.

Good web apps easily require 10 times more effort to develop than a similar windows app.

Eric

Dear englere,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I have completed chap 1 and now realise that "There really is no WYSIWYG development on the web, even though that is a desirable goal. You simply can't get an accurate rendering at design time that includes the same kind of drag-and-drop ease of layout offered by the windows model.".

I wrongly assumed that wyswyg would be somewhat similar to what you get under the windows model. But I do now appreciate the result that can be obtained using <div>, css and Skins.

Can you please point me to some links on how to split a web template into different parts and then incorporate the elements into css, though I have had a good into thur chap 1.

I really appreciate the book.

And thank you again.

I've never approached it from that angle. I usually have some images to start with and I have to design some glue elements to make it look like the images are part of an overall theme. I use Paintshop Pro instead of Photoshop, but it doesn't matter which graphical editor you use as long as you understand how to use it.

The training videos at Lynda.com are a good way to learn how to use these tools. Here's some free videos on Microsoft's Expression Design to give you an idea of what these are like:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=339

And here is Expression Blend, which is a tool especially for coders. This lets you animate graphics made with Expression Design:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=384

The Expression tools are for WPF and Silverlight. They are vector-based and not bitmap based. I normally use bitmap tools like Paintshop Pro or Photoshop, since they are more appropriate for traditional ASP.NET. But Silverlight is coming on strong, and will be quite important moving forward.

Eric