The importance of the designer is quite obvious when developing ASP.NET Web Forms. It allows visual and nonvisual components to be added quite easily to the Web Form. When components are added to the designer surface, VisualStudio.NET adds all the required references and settings to the Code Behind module in the generated-code region. All this is hidden from the developer. When the form is run, these references are instantiated, properties are set, and visual and nonvisual elements come alive.
When developing ASP.NET Web Services, the importance of the designer surface is less obvious. A Web Service does not have visual elements associated with it, but nonvisual elements can be added to the designer. This can provide great convenience for using nonvisual components and resources like the event log.
The Server Explorer window in VisualStudio.NET (Ctrl+Alt+S) serves two purposes: It allows you to manage your machine or other machine on the network. For example, you can use Server Explorer instead of SQL Server's Enterprise Manager to manage databases on your network. The other purpose, which is related to this section, is that Server Explorer allows you to drag-and-drop elements from the resources it contains to the designer surface of your Web Service or Web Form. This is a very easy short cut to creating references and setting their properties to access that resource in code.
The EventLog example illustrates how a Web Service gets access to the system event log by dragging-and-dropping the event log icon from the Server Explorer window in VisualStudio.NET (Ctrl+Alt+S) over to the designer surface window, and then setting the event log's properties in the Properties window. Obviously, the whole purpose of this is to reduce the amount of code you have to write. The following is output from this example (because it is a very simple example, IE was used as the client, so there is no separate ASP.NET Web Forms client) :