ASP.NET - Visual Studio Designer Improvements (Now available in v14.2)

Your Visual Studio design-time experience has now been improved with new time-saving designer dialogs for the DevExpress ASP.NET controls in the v14.2 release!

Designer Dialog?

A designer dialog is simply a dialog window that saves you time because it combines many sub-properties of controls into one area. For example, the DevExpress ASP.NET GridView control has separate dialogs that help you create and manage items like:

• Columns
• Summaries
• Client-side Events

Now with the v14.2 release, you can access them all in one dialog:

This is a big time-saver because you have items in one location without the need to go looking through the Visual Studio properties dialog.

Client-Event Editor

The DevExpress ASP.NET Controls support a rich set of client-side API and the designer dialog window provides a nice editor for you to create or modify your JavaScript source:

 And you'll notice that the editor also provides JavaScript syntax highlighting.

Smart Tag Link

To access the designer dialog window, click on the "Designer" link in the smart tag dialog which is available in the design view of Visual Studio:

WebForms Only

Because ASP.NET MVC does not have any design-time experience, the new designer dialogs are only available for ASP.NET WebForms platform.

WinForms Inspired

The designer dialogs feature was inspired by our WinForms controls that have had these dialogs for many years. We found them so useful that we 'borrowed' the idea for our ASP.NET controls.

So, if you're familiar with the DevExpress WinForms controls then you'll find these new dialogs helpful in ASP.NET too.

What do you think about the new DevExpress ASP.NET designer dialog windows? Drop me a line below. Thanks!