I have a lot of problems with layout when building web applications in VS2008. Usually I get all my CSS set and the page looks great inside Visual Studio. I fire up the ASP.NET Development Server and load the web page in a browser....and it looks nothing like it does in VS2008. I originally assumed Visual Studio just used IE's Trident rendering engine, but apparently that's not true. My sites are often initially broken in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome/Safari. I usually end up fiddling with my styles for hours until it works, by when Visual Studio is showing me a really-messed-up-looking page but in a real browser it looks fine.

Any tips? Is there a hotfix/patch, or is it possible to change which rendering engine VS uses somehow?

The majority of professional ASP.NET developers hardly ever look at Design View.  It's only real use is to provide a way to quickly add event handler code by double-clicking controls.

I understand that Expression Web has a better rendering engine than Visual Web Developer, but you cannot beat checking the results in a browser or 5 as you go.

Even Dreamweaver falls short in some aspects of rendering in Design View.

Expression Web has identical rendering engine. It is shared across products, and, in fact, rendering code is owned mostly by VWD. Neither product is using MSHTML (last version that used Trident was VS 2005). Current designer is based on former FrontPage code. There is a lot of work being done to bring designer closer to the CSS standard in VS 2010.

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT):

Expression Web has identical rendering engine.

Thanks for the clarification.

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT):

Expression Web has identical rendering engine. It is shared across products, and, in fact, rendering code is owned mostly by VWD. Neither product is using MSHTML (last version that used Trident was VS 2005). Current designer is based on former FrontPage code. There is a lot of work being done to bring designer closer to the CSS standard in VS 2010.

I'm really glad to hear that VS 2010 will have a better designer. I would much prefer to preview changes using the designer instead of a full browser.

mott555:

I'm really glad to hear that VS 2010 will have a better designer. I would much prefer to preview changes using the designer instead of a full browser

I too am interested in seeing the result of the work that is being done in this area.  But I noticed Mikhail's use of the words "closer to" rather than "compliant with".

Hopefully you will see a blog post in our team blog on what is new and supported in the designer. VS 2010 Beta 1 is out and you can try it if you want. Browser 100% compliance is important, but designer is somewhat different and there are certain less commonly used CSS features that may not be supported or may be not fit into the schedule due to time or resource restrictions (or code base architectural issues). For example, there is part of CSS standard that describes how to handle broken CSS statements. It is important for different browsers to be consistent in that sense and browsers have to render legacy [broken] pages in a consistent manner. In the designer however, one can simply fix the error in the CSS source...