Okay "tips hat" thanks -- well now that at least uses the layout system that is good but it would still be a nightmare to have to work with. Your comment and the issue that I find to be the biggest one that pops up is that "it is never meant to be read or edited;" which means that if you want to do some simple tweaks you have to get very creative with the Designer --or-- wade through that mass and try to figure out how to make those tweaks -- which may get thrown out when you render another UI due to other changes needing to be made.
Still to each their own -- I personally (having worked extensively with post production code) prefer to create code that I fully understand and can at a fairly quick glance get a solid gist of what it is doing because -- even if I wrote it -- if I have to come back to in a few months I am not going to remember what exactly I was doing let alone what someone else might have been doing.
Once you have had to struggle with this kind of mess trying to figure out where the bug is and/or how to implement that minor change the customer is asking for -- you will begin to understand why having anything that was meant never to be read or edited becomes a major problem in inefficiency. Besides I can render that code almost as quickly (or perhaps quicker) than you can using the Designer and when I am done I have no need to revisit the Designer just make the in-code tweaks necessary thus only incremental changes rather than sweeping uncontrolled changes implemented by something that I have no idea of how it will actually render what I have designed.
Still to each their own -- I personally (having worked extensively with post production code) prefer to create code that I fully understand and can at a fairly quick glance get a solid gist of what it is doing because -- even if I wrote it -- if I have to come back to in a few months I am not going to remember what exactly I was doing let alone what someone else might have been doing.
Once you have had to struggle with this kind of mess trying to figure out where the bug is and/or how to implement that minor change the customer is asking for -- you will begin to understand why having anything that was meant never to be read or edited becomes a major problem in inefficiency. Besides I can render that code almost as quickly (or perhaps quicker) than you can using the Designer and when I am done I have no need to revisit the Designer just make the in-code tweaks necessary thus only incremental changes rather than sweeping uncontrolled changes implemented by something that I have no idea of how it will actually render what I have designed.