I've begun trying to create some basic applications and controls and am left
wondering if Microsoft rushed this to market, is just anti-web standards, or
just wants it to be hard to create great sites.  For instance:

When I create a template or region editing control.  Why doesn't the region
or template pick up the attributes of the container I'm editing (and
preferably staying in the flow of the page)?  Why does this matter?  Well, if
I apply CSS to the template container, when I'm editing the template/region
I'm SOL for getting that applied to what I'm editing.  The result is I either
duplicate a lot of look and feel throughout the CSS just to get design time
to work or I write and maintain two different CSS's, hoping they don't
diverge.  Also ever notice that if you use CSS to make a region a particular
size that at design time you get a default size editing region/template?  I'm
sure there's a hack somewhere to fix this, but it for some reason eludes me.

Were skins a last minute idea to a) allow developers to quickly turn out
horribly bloated sites b) a patch so that the developers never had to talk to
the web guys about what decent stylable content looks like?  I can see a
purpose for skins, but just barely and certainly not as a replacement for
allowing you to apply styles to various aspects of a control.  While I was
frustrated styling a default form, I've seen that if you like one look and
don't want to add anything fancy it's possible to get a basic FormView styled
via CSS.  What does that mean?  You end up editing and re-writing the
autogenerated form, not once but THREE times (and that means debugging and
maintenance just jumped three times as well).  Also note that you can't see
them overlaid so you probabbly end up building something that lets you flip
between view and other modes to ensure the form is solid).  Flexible, but I'm
not sure it's a leap forward in code reduction or RAD.  What about editing in
a datagrid?  Well look at the samples, you either end up setting a lot of
properties or you get a jumpy editing experience (see like every demo on the
web) while switching between edit and view mode.  And for both of these, is
it me or why exactly did they opt not to apply max character widths to fields
that were added either dynamically or converted to a template based on what's
in the datasource they pulled the field from?  That's one more edit I have to
keep in sync and is totally manual (or I end up writing more validation
logic, see problem below, and notifying the user late that gee, he just typed
too much stuff, in 14 fields...)

Have you ever wondered why they view error validation like a student fresh
out of college?  What's the likelyhood that you will have exactly one thing
thats worth checking for a bit of input?  (At least assuming you want your
site to actually function in the real world).  Why didn't they provide basic
validation functionality that went into a validation component (so you could
declaratively combine a required field and a range field for instance)  sort
of a composite validation.  Sure you can write a control to do what you want,
but you have to build the infrastructure if you want to plug multiple error
checks together depending on the control.  Think I'm making it up?  Look at
every example from Microsoft (even the ones specifically on validation).

Ever try to inherit a Button control?  what's missing in the property pane?  
Oh gee, the TEXT field!  Just go back and override it?  Nope, it's not
overrideable in that control for some reason.

While I'm sure it's possible to create semi decent sites using pure CSS with
the default Forview and Gridview (and probably other controls) and get a
decent design and runtime experience, it at least to me seems FAR harder and
more obscure than coding a CSS site in ASP (bam, there went 6+ years), but
should the design experience affect the finished site in any way?  Other than
possibly making it easier to make the site cooler or faster?  Shouldn't it
facilitate making lighter faster pages instead of promoting bloat?  (Which
incidentally means more debugging and maintenance down the road).

Don't get me wrong, I love VS2005, but at least some of the beauty, speed
and ease of use appear at best skin deep.

Slighly disgruntled,

Larry