Editing ASP.NET Web Pages in Visual Web Developer Overview
You can create and edit Web pages — both HTML pages and ASP.NET Web pages — using the Visual Web Developer page designer. The designer provides you with two views of your page: Design view, which displays the page in much the way it will appear in a browser, and Source view, which shows you the markup (such as HTML) for the page.
Design View
Design view provides a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor. You can type text directly into the editor and format it using menu and toolbar commands. You can also drag elements from the toolbox, and if you want, position them two-dimensionally using x- and y-coordinates.
Controls that require complex configuration display Smart Tags, which are menus that allow you to quickly perform the most commonly required tasks.
Source View
Source view displays the markup (the text, HTML elements, and control elements) for your page, which you edit directly. In Source view, the designer offers the following features:
Validation The designer checks the syntax of your markup and underlines errors, similar to the way Microsoft Word performs spell checking. You can configure the designer to check validity against different schemas or browser definitions. For more information, see Markup Validation in Visual Web Developer.
IntelliSense As you type, the designer offers you options that are appropriate to the context in which you are working. For example, if you are typing an HTML tag, the designer offers you a list of valid attributes for that tag.
Outlining You can mark sections of the page as regions, and then collapse and expand them. For example, if you have a very long table element in your page, you can mark it as a region and collapse it when you are not working on it. For details, see How to: Collapse and Expand HTML Elements in Visual Web Developer.
Tag formatting You can set options for how the editor formats your markup as you type and when you reformat the document. For details, see Format, HTML, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box and Tag Specific Options.
Page Templates
When you create a Web page in Visual Web Developer, the new page contains markup that includes the most commonly used elements for that page. For example, when you create a new ASP.NET Web page, the new page includes a @ Page directive, html and body elements, and so on.
By default, the templates for new pages include markup that is compliant with XHTML standards. For more information, see ASP.NET and XHTML and XHTML in Visual Web Developer.