Quick Preview

For Iron Speed Designer

Live Preview

The latest versions of Iron Speed Designer come with a powerful preview feature called Live Preview which allows a developer to see ASP.NET pages that have been generated for an Iron Speed application. The Live Preview will display a fully interactive instance of the page. This live preview feature can be slow for large projects the first time it is used after the application has been built. It invokes the ASP.NET compiler to generate assemblies for the whole application before it renders a page. Other pages displayed after the application has been compiled do not experience such a great delay, but it still does take a noticeable amount of time before the preview is ready.

This delay can become annoying when developing an Iron Speed application. It is quite typical for a developer to work with a page, make changes, build the application and then want to see a preview of the changes made. It is also quite typical for this to be done repeatedly with each page a developer works with. In this scenario, the application is completely rebuilt using the ASP.NET compiler each time the Live Preview is used.

Quick Preview

Working alongside the Live Preview in Iron Speed Designer, Light Speed IT Solutions has developed a Quick Preview application. This application shows a representation of Iron Speed generated ASP.NET pages in a fraction of the time it takes for the Live Preview feature to display a page.

The Quick Preview application has some limitations compared to the Live Preview feature, but it does provide a very good representation of the ASP.NET page. The application converts ASP.NET tags in to HTML, bypassing the need for the ASP.NET compiler. It also uses information contained within the Iron Speed generated ASP.NET application to enhance the HTML produced, including displaying resource based text and also providing sample text for data-bound controls.

Limitations

Quick Preview has the following limitations:

• It does not display live data like the Iron Speed Live Preview, instead it displays field information that is data-bound to a control
• It only provides an approximation of the HTML that will be rendered when the application is run. This approximation is very close, but some controls such as the tab control do not render properly. (We have chosen to display all tabs so you can see at a glance what each tab will look like)
• It removes all JavaScript and link addresses and as a consequence it is not as interactive as a normal Iron Speed application page
• It attempts to resolve all resource strings used by a page, but cannot be guaranteed to display all of them
• Controls that are loaded using code blocks are ignored

Free and Full Version

The Quick Preview application was available in a free limited version and a full paid for version. We are now making the Full version available for free, which can be downloaded from here. The full version of the application includes a file system watcher that responds to changes made in a web application while the developer edits the application. This allows the developer to automatically see a preview of changes made when the Quick Preview application is run side by side with Iron Speed Designer.