I am looking to display this in my .aspx page, without using special character XML tags, can this be achieved?
<asp:ServerTag Property1="a"
Property2="b"
Property3="c" <%-- Comment why this particular property is necessary --%>
Property4="d" />
However, I am greeted with the error message Server tags cannot contain <% ... %> constructs. If I use an HTML <!-- --> tag, I'm told the server tag is not well formed.
Is there any other syntax to make this possible?
It's not possible, no. The server tags need to be well-formed XML and you can't have tags like that in XML. You can put a comment at the top, of course, like so:
<!-- Property2 needed because... -->
<asp:ServerTag Property1="a" Property2="b" Property3="c" />
Put server-side comment above your server-side control.
<!-- client-side comment (html) - appears in html source but not rendered on page<%-- server-side comment - stripped out on server, never sees light of day, browser never knows about itlike this
<%-- Usage:
Property2 is xyz...
Property3 will .. abc. Ignore Property 1 when this is set. etc
--%>
<asp:ServerTag Property1="a"
Property2="b"
Property3="c"
Property4="d" />
It's just like putting source code comments above your functions.
Think "server to server". It will make the difference between your HTML source looking like
cluttered with "pass through" html comment <!--:
<!-- Property usage: abc, def, ...xyz -->
Rendered server control contents.
vs. the cleaner stripped out " <%-- source:
Rendered server control contents.
Less bandwidth with latter too. No extraneous (and confusing to user) comments in HTML source.
Not necessarily like that but you may want to consider decorating the property in c# to let the user know its relevance. After that something like resharper (or maybe vs) will give you this information when you try to set it.
