A visual webpage editing tool that can support asp.net web forms tags

Question

I've been looking hard to find a web page editor that can let me visually edit an already-designed asp.net web form page. for the whole period, I've made my page designs with Dreamweaver (now I'm using Dreamweaver CS4) and transfered my designs to Visual Studio 2010 to make asp.net pages from that template. Table editing feature for web forms in Visual Studio is really annoying and by trying to change a column width, the table structure is corrupted and VS decides to change everything on that table (compare it with Dreamweaver which only changes those two columns which their border is changed instead of the whole columns of that table).

Unfortunately Dreamweaver does not recognize the asp.net tags syntax and because of that it can not properly render them in design mode. I want to know if you know any tool (preferably non-Microsoft tool) that can let me open an asp.net web form in it and edit the page elements visually without side effects that Visual Studio causes to my page design. (I use HTML tables for arranging my page elements.)

By the way I looked at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors

but after opening all the visual editors web pages, I did not find any tool that supports ASP.net tags.

Answer 1

you can use AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor.Editor. Put the DLL in your project and than put in the page, than you can edit. Create some logic to view and edit with some permission, and your page will have content editable.

Answer 2

Is there a particular reason that though you are working on a Microsoft platform that you don't want to use a Microsoft editor?

MS provides two free tools that may help you:

• Visual Studio Express
• Web Matrix

Also, I highly recommend using CSS classes to set widths on ASP.NET generated tables/columns. (Rather than using the styling attributes for those ASP.NET controls.)

Hope this helps.