Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

1.7. Practical Tips on Visual Web Developer

Most of the chapters in this book end with a short section with useful tips. These are tips that either didn't fit in anywhere in the text or that encourage you to further explore or test out things. Sometimes they may seem irrelevant or hard to understand at first, but you'll find that as you make your way through this book and look back at tips from previous chapters, things start to make sense. Don't worry if you don't understand certain things completely the first time you see them. Give the idea some thought and revisit the topic a few days later. Hopefully, by letting the ideas sink in a little, things start to make more sense automatically. This applies not only to the Practical Tips section, but to the entire book.

• Before you move on to the next chapter, play around with VWD some more. Add a couple of pages to your site, drag and drop some controls from the Toolbox onto your pages, and view them in your browser. That way, you'll have a better understanding of the tools and the many controls available when you start the next chapter.

• Familiarize yourself with the many options to tweak the Visual Web Developer IDE. When building web sites, you spend most of your time in this IDE, so it makes sense to tweak it as much as possible to your liking. Don't be afraid to mess it up; you can always revert to previous settings.

• Take some time to browse through the settings you find in the Options dialog box of VWD (accessible through the Tools ...