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Use server-side comments to temporary disable part of ASP.NET page

You are coding away on an ASP.NET page, and are trying to isolate a problem within the page. You have some existing html/controls/markup/in-line code that is being used on the page, and you want to temporarily comment it out while you fix the problem.
ASP.NET supports a little known feature called “server-side comments” that you can use to completely disable code/controls/html in a page. Server-side comments in ASP.NET are delimited using a <%-- --%> syntax. For example:

    <%--
        Commented out HTML/CODE/Markup. Anything with
        this block will not be parsed/handled by ASP.NET.
 
        <asp:Calendar runat="server"></asp:Calendar>
        <%# Eval("SomeProperty") %>
    --%>

The key difference between client-side HTML comments and server-side comments is that with client-side comments code/controls will still be executed on the server. With server-side comments, the ASP.NET compiler will ignore everything whithin these blocks.

7/21/2007