There seems to be a major problem with the way the asp.net design tool lays out HTML and embedded pages or user controls. I have a page that has 4 different user controls. In some cases a user control that is positioned under another user control will appear to be available and working but its members are not available and the properties of collection objects are are not the right value. For example, I have a user control that is a checkbox list and two buttons. It is positioned on the parent page below another user control that is very similar. The buttons highlight when you roll over them but they do not post back when clicked. Also, checkboxes in the checkbox list also highlight when you roll over them and you can check and uncheck them. However, when you loop through the items collection at runtime the selected property is always false. If I take the same control and just dump it on the top of the page so it is not near another user control everything works perfectly. I know it must have something to do with the way the HTML generator is using absolute positioning so the browser thinks the objects are overlapping but visually they are not. Everything is inside tables as well and I notice that none of the HTML is laid out in the usual logical order like you would expect. For example table 1 might be at the bottom of the HTML code and table 11 at the top. The HTML code generator does not seem to be able to keep track of what goes where on complex layouts when the developer is changing and moving things around during design.

My job here is to emulate desktop forms in web forms. This general issue is costing us mountains of time and money to debug and research.

I guess the question is, is there a third party plugin that does a better job of managing HTML output and can give you some indication that a control will not function properly in it's current position on the page?