So yesterday I was working on a calendaring program for a job I am doing and was trying to integrate Master Pages into the picture. This was started back in VS 2003 so I had to manually add the master pages to the site.

Pretty easy right? 

1.) Add the Page Attribute
2.) Take out the HTML tags (HTML, HEAD, BODY, FORM, etc...)
3.) Add the content section tags

And I should be good to go right? 

Of course not. When I tried to load the page (in designer or browser ) some of the controls would not stay in the container.  I tried to add them many different ways, click in the container, double click on the control in the toolbox, cut the control and paste into the containers, and of course I checked the the HTML to make sure the controls were in between the container tags.

Grrrrrrrrrr.  It was driving me crazy!!!!

So I did what any frustrated programmer would do. I Called my friends. 

But that was no good. They were all at VS Live (Darn them)

So you want to know how I fixed it?
Was it a bug in VS?
Was it user error?

Well kind of both.

A student had asked me how to achive the grid control on a page like in VS2003.  So I showed them how to go to Tools/Options  (HTML CSS Section) and I had set the default behavior of the controls to "Absolute Position"

Duh!!!  I had never set it back so when I tried to add a control to the container it instead used an absolute position.

Man what a pain.

Hopefully this will help someone else who may stumble in it.

Happy programming (Grrrr)

Doc