I ran into an interesting issue a couple of days ago with the Orcas ASP.NET designer - I had several controls on the page that are marked as display:none (they get activated by AJAX calls) and the designer didn't show them. Now that's accurate rendering <g> - except in this case I didn't want the the editor to actually render this way. In VS 2005 the editor actually shows any controls that are 'invisible' in a variety of ways.

I filed a bug report, because well it's kinda useful to be able to still be able to design controls even if they are invisible. Got a note back today from Omar Khan from Microsoft which points out there's a much nicer solution to this problem: Orcas includes a host of options that let you customize exactly what the designer renders!

Very nice!

I also noticed that the new Orcas designer properly respects control block mode in custom controls. So if you have a custom control that has a <div> tag as its top level element it properly blocks the the entire area. In VS 2005 the designer would not properly render the control in the designer somehow managing to render it inline. I tended to write special designer code around controls with an explicit <div style='width:100%'> to focre the designer to do the right thing - apparently that issue is no more. Yay!

The designer works well for me and it's speedy enough that it's not a burden. I mostly use Split view mode working mostly in text.

There are still some odd control focus issues with the property editor not properly synching with the control that has focus in some situations. For me the scenario is this:

• Open a form in split view
• Go to a control - right click - Properties
• Property sheet shows but it's on the document
• At this point no amount of clicking around the document changes the Property Sheet
• Click on the source window - property sheet synchs quickly
• Back into the designer - now it properly stays synched
• If edit in another window and come back the cycle repeats - until I click the editor first

I bugged this too although it was marked at not reproduciable. Maybe others can try this and see if the same behavior comes up. This is something that's been going on in VS 2005 as well, and I for one would like to see this fixed. It's most annoying during demonstrations when you're only half paying attention and start making property adjustments to the WRONG control <g>...

Source:http://www.west-wind.com