For the past few weeks I've been deep diving into ASP.Net land. One of the things I wasn't prepared for was the amount of time I would have to spend tweaking and changing HTML and Java Scripts. A lot.
Lots of times I found myself lost in the sea of HTML and scripts, until I found a very cool feature of vs.Net: The “Document outline” window. Whether you're on design view or HTML view - just press CTRL+ALT+T and the window opens up showing you a hierarchical tree view of the page structure - tables, Divs, every thing and it jumps to where you are in the page so you can actually get a “You are here” feature like in those city maps on billboards. Very cool. However, this is not news to lots of folks. What I did discover is another feature in this window:
One of the things that window does not show is all the scripts in the page, or does it? Look at the top left corner of that window. That little flash icon just wants to be pressed! Voilà! You have all the scripts in the page including a list of all client and objects events (those that are implemented are highlighted in bold. Double clicking on one of those events automatically inserts the event wire up in the HTML and creates a simple function to take care of that event in java script, landing you right inside it, VB style. If only it would write all those functions in a single separate script block that would rule. Can't have everything I guess :)
Very cool!