Is it just me or does anybody else hate this VS.NET ‘feature’ in ASP.NET projects:

This is a screen shot of a solution that contains an ASP.NET project and happens to have one ASPX and a CSS file open in the IDE. But I’m actually compiling an assembly individually in this case, yet I still get these annoying CSS validation errors.

While I think it’s actually a good thing ASP.NET is validating my HTML and CSS (even though the named colors above are legal colors!), I don’t think HTML or CSS errors like this qualify as errors. Especially in this case where I’m in a completely different context compiling an Assembly individually. These should be warnings or better yet get their own tab (or button in this case) to display or hide on.

So there are two issues here: First the fact that HTML format errors really have no business being flagged as errors. Errors in this environment should only be things that break the build and HTML errors don’t qualify in my book. I can appreciate the folks who are Nazis about their HTML Validation and want to see them prominently, but having them show as errors doesn’t do anything other than display here – it’s not breaking the build, so this is purely an annoying and non-configurable GUI feature.

But this is really making VS.NET a lot less usable especially for existing applications that are up ported (or come from designers for that matter – I have two of those types of apps I’m sitting on which have 50k pages with all sorts of CSS 3.0 tags that don’t validate). The thing that really irks me about this is that as the specs change this will result in errors even if your code is clean in the future… can you spell built-in obsolescence?

The other is that of context. If I compile an individual assembly, that has nothing to do with HTML markup tags why should the IDE show these errors in this place – it’s completely out of context. There’s no options to have VS show the difference between background compile/eval errors of what’s open and what compile you just ran. All this stuff just gets jumbled together into a single bin. In the case above, 30 non-essential errors preceed the DLL compile errors followed by a couple of more HTML errors from the ASPX page open.

And yes I realize I can turn of HTML validation or I could simply close the CSS and ASPX pages and then compile.

Turning off the validation kinda bites too:  a) it’s actually a very useful feature, that’s just badly implemented and b) turning off this setting doesn’t seem to ‘stick’ – validation seems to return even after having turned it off.

I made a suggestion a long while back about this, but it was turned out. Am I the only one who thinks this is a pain in the ass?