Hello,

The vs designer seems to be very good, however, it doesnt seem to apply themes which makes it kind of useless. 

For example, in my main theme stylesheet i will relatively position some images which work fine in the browser but they dont sit at the right location in the designer. So i end up with a bunch of images sitting next to each other in a row in the designer but a page that renders fine in the browser.

So if the designer doesnt apply stylesheets what good is it?

I broke it in the first 5 minutes which makes it unusable.

Unless i am going about it the wrong way? Or does it do this to everyone that uses themese and master pages?

Cheers

Did you set your default theme in the web.config? 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0yy5hxdk.aspx 

Are you using Theme or StylesheetTheme attribute? Can you post page markup and the stylesheet content here as well?

Dreamweaver and Front Page do the same thing. Were any of your images in tables or layers? That usually contributes since the IDE applies a thickness to the tables to make them easy to modify. "Relativity" could change between the IDE, IE, FireFox, Opera, etc. Unless it was a major difference, it was probably just the nature of the design environment.

Thanks guys,

By the sounds of it, it seems like your designers dont get broken with css which gives me some hope of fixing this. I thought it a bit odd that microsoft would go to all the trouble of creating an excellent designer that just breaks with css and their main theme feature.

Did you set your default theme in the web.config? 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0yy5hxdk.aspx 

 Yes, did that. Like i said, the theme does get applied in my browsers so obviously the theme is set in config but it doesnt get recognized by the designer.

 I have a Theme folder with a stylesheet.css

It gets applied in config like so:  

<pages theme="Main Theme">

 Main Theme is the name of a folder inside App_Themes

The stylesheet.css contents are below:

width: 727px;

height: 21px;

position: relative;

height: 17px;

left: 105px;

left:116px;

width:75px;

Neither VS 2005 nor 2008 designer supports Theme attribute. Try using StylesheetTheme attribute instead - it is fully supported in both 2005 and 2008.