This is something I seem to be doing an awful as of late. I start out with some control (say a GridView), then switch to some other control (say a Repeater), but I don't want to delete the GridView control until I get the Repeater control working.

You might have tried commenting out the control the HTML way — i.e., <!--...--> — and you probably found out that ASP .NET engine still parses it. Until recently, I was dealing with this the hard way: cutting & pasting the control into Notepad.

No longer.

Enter Server Comments

Namely:

<%--

 <asp:GridView ID="ProductsGridView" runat="server" DataSource="ProductsDataSource">
 </asp:GridView>

--%>

ASP .NET will ignore everything within a server comment block.