Converting from ASP 3.0: some formatting and design questions

[Dave]

I am converting an ASP Classic web site to an ASP.NET application and have
some real basic formatting or design questions. (The classic ASP site has
both code (forms) and content pages.)

1.When moving a significant amount of content from the ASP classic page
(basically formatted text in <P> tags) to an ASP.NET webform, is it better
to add it to the webform as HTML or should I put each paragraph into
separate (or perhaps a single) "label" web server controls?

2. Do most ASP.NET developers use the grid layout or HTML tags to position
their content? Is there an advantage of one over the other?

3. Should I convert content only Classic ASP pages to web forms (ASPX) or
should I just make them HTML pages?

4. In the Visual Studio 2003 grid layout when I try to position a label at
the very bottom of the display, I cannot easily expand the label (increase
its height property) by simply dragging the handle on its bottom edge to
give me the desired height. Instead I can only drag a few pixels beyond the
lower boundry and then I must use the scroll bar to scroll down a few
pixels, expose the handle, drag it a few more pixels, etc etc. This is
extremely frustrating. Of course I can change the height of the control by
setting that value in HTML view but when I am trying to position several
controls at the very bottom of my web form I don't want to keep switching
back and forth between views. Is there an easy way to handle this?

5. Finally, is there a way to left justify a group of selected controls in
the grid view of a web form?

[John Saunders]

"Dave" <da*******@newsgroup.nospam> wrote in message
news:uQ****************@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...

I am converting an ASP Classic web site to an ASP.NET application and have
some real basic formatting or design questions. (The classic ASP site has
both code (forms) and content pages.)

1.When moving a significant amount of content from the ASP classic page
(basically formatted text in <P> tags) to an ASP.NET webform, is it better
to add it to the webform as HTML or should I put each paragraph into
separate (or perhaps a single) "label" web server controls?
If you're not going to manipulate the text from the server side, then there
is no reason to put it into a label control. Leave it as is.
2. Do most ASP.NET developers use the grid layout or HTML tags to
position their content? Is there an advantage of one over the other?
I never use the grid layout. It produces extremely ugly code with many
nested <div> tags with absolute positioning. I prefer to let the designers
design page layouts, but if forced into it, I use tables.
3. Should I convert content only Classic ASP pages to web forms (ASPX) or
should I just make them HTML pages?

If they're content only, then leave them alone.

John Saunders

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for John's informative suggestions.

Hi Dave,

Of couse, generally, I think use plain HTML is much better than Label
control if we just want to display some static content. Label Control will
also store its "Text" in the ViewState which will increase the page's
download size. Also, if there is a page which only output static contents,
recommend that expose it as html page rather than aspx page since the IIS
can directly serve it so as to improve performance.

As for designing the layout in asp.net page, I always think use the normal
flowlayout is the best choice in web page designing. That'll make the page
more flexible when the browser's size changes. The GridLayout is mainly for
those who're more familiar to the windows form(absolute position)
designing. Also, I also very like using <table> to structure the web pages'
layout as John has mentioned, I think you can also consider this.

In addition, as for the
"justify a group of selected controls in the grid view of a web form"

I haven't found any good means to do this, maybe this is also due to the
limition of web page design(quite diferent from the windows form design).

If you have any further questions, please feel free to post here. Thanks.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

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