title: ASP.Net - Transition from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010
body: <p>we are in process of switching our ASP.Net development from Visual Studio 2003 and .Net 1.1 to Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 3.5. So far, we successfully migrated our back end code and after some fight the ASP.Net front end code too. While the work on the back end code resumed with usual productivity, working on the ASP.Net front end code is massively hampered because of following issues:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>The Visual Studio 2010 Web Designer crashes frequently (e. g. after using the "Undo" function) - we are used to the stability problems of Visual Studio 2003 Web Designer when working with large web forms, but the new Web Designer crashes frequently even with trivial web forms. Is there anything to make the thing stable? ServicePack 1 brought no help.</p></li>
  <li><p>When adding new controls to a webform in the web designer, the declaration of the new control will <em>never</em> automatically propagate to the code behind page in the migrated web form. New web forms created from scratch seem to work ok. The migrated web forms maintain the old file structure (aspx, aspx.cs and aspx.resx), while the new web forms get a new file structure (aspx, aspx.cs and aspx.designer.cs. Recreating all the existing web forms manually to get the new file structure would be a very painful operation. Is there a way to make the old decent working propagation of controls' declaration to code behind file work in Visual Studio 2010 too?</p></li>
  <li><p>(Currently our biggest problem): when designing a web form, we basically put the textboxes, labels, buttons etc. in a div with ms_positioning="GridLayout". We define absolute coordinates for every control in the div. This doesnot seem to work properly in Visual Studio 2010. With a lot of effort we can somehow continue using this approach, but adding a new button or textbox to a web form means massive effort now. Without paying really much attention it can even result in overwritig of the css-classes-file (the Web Designer sometimes decides to write the coordinates not in the aspx file but in the css file). I read recently that using absolute coordinates to position stuff on a web page is a very bad and deprecated approach. I tend to believe it seeing how gruesome it has to be done in the new Visual Studio. But what is the correct way to create winforms-like web forms rapidly? (With rapidly I mean simple drag-drop-point-click way of designing stuff).</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any help.</p>
  
  <p>Best Regards
  Erich Horak</p>