My client does not like the Metronic UI provided in the ASPNETZERO template. He is looking into getting something custom designed by a UI/UX designer or purchasing another UI template. I wanted to find out if anyone else has done this change with ASPNETZERO and I wanted to ask some questions around this process.
Have you completely removed Metronic template from ASPNETZERO
and used another UI template?
What challenges did you run into?
How much effort did it take?
Any tips, tricks and advice that you can share on making this change would be much appreciated!
I haven't done such a change myself, but as a user and UI/UX student, here are some tips:
Have you completely removed Metronic template from ASPNETZERO and used another UI template?
If you're completely replacing the UI with another template, you can easily remove Metronic UI. That's the great thing about ASP.NET Zero (and the underlying ABP)'s n-layered architecture.
What challenges did you run into?
Make sure that the UI template that the designer gives can actually be used with the data that you want to display from view models. Tip 1: Request that the designer considers the models.
How much effort did it take?
It will take a lot of effort binding the UI back to the view models and some models may change since a UX designer may propose a different flow. Tip 2: Request that the designer uses some form of view model, or template strings like {Name} for the hard-coded values in his design.
Tip 3: Factor in time for ajax configuration, since the designer may only provide static screens.
Good luck!
Update
Do you know all the files/folders I need to alter/remove or change in the ASPNETZERO solution?
The particular files depend on what you actually modify. The designer should provide you with *.html and *.css files, maybe even *.js files. For the most part, you can leave the current *.css and *.js files (under wwwroot) alone. *.cshtml files (under Views) are safe to alter.
Related
I want to make a small change to how the text on panels is displayed in an Umbraco grid.
I've found I can make the change to nestedcontent.controllers.js in just a few lines, and this works.
However, if/when we upgrade Umbraco this change may be lost.
What are the best practices? Alternative ways of changing Umbraco behavior?
Let try to answer this briefly... if you are talking about the back-end that is.
What are the best practices? Alternative ways of changing Umbraco behavior?
Angular & Plugins
Best way by far is to write plug-ins. Plug-ins can be in the first place property editors. But it could also be used to interfere with the complete backend. But you can go much further.
Almost everything can be extended, custom dashboards, custom sections, custom trees, ... you name it and it probably is possible to extend in the backend.
Everything is powered by angular. Nothing stops you from doing very funky stuff. Packages like Nexu intercept every angular http call and then run their own logic.
From .net Code
A lot of the umbraco logic (like the complete request pipeline) can be replaced by your own implementation. Nothing stops you from run your own UrlProvider.
And what about the events (doing things after somethings happens). E.g. after a save.
Best practices
I think a best practice is to leave umbraco as is. Do not change it if you don't really need to. Use all extension points where you can.
And use the default Umbraco stuff. Don't reinvent the wheel. Use things which already exists in Umbraco. It will give you the possiblity to build better websites for content editors, and faster for the users.
Looks like it's a package specific file (Nested Content)? You could download the package file, unzip it and make the change before re-zipping it and keep the zip file in a safe place? ;-) Or, if it's a change that everyone could benefit from, make a pull request on Github?
I say make the change, and whilst you're at it put in a Pull Request for the project author to change it permanently.
Here's why I wouldn't worry about the Umbraco upgrades overwriting it:
Upgrades in Umbraco aren't automatic, unless you're using the cloud version. So this means you make a choice to upgrade. When doing any sort of development it is always a good idea to have your code checked into a source control of some sort. I like SVN or GitHub personally.
When upgrading an Umbraco site, I always make sure I have checked in all of my files to source control. If you do this, when it comes to doing the upgrade, you can see if the file has changed, and on the line where you made your change, you can revert that line back to what you had it at.
I hope this makes sense.
My group is working on a new web application and is considering using MVC. However, there are members who would rather include pages than use master pages. Is this possible to do in ASP.NET MVC? In the small amount of time that I've poked around with MVC I have not yet been able to figure out how one might accomplish that.
Why the preference?
Having used both in the past, Master Pages are much easier to use. You just have to get over the (very small) learning curve.
ASP.NET MVC doesn't force you to do either one though...
If you like the Include method, then you would probably feel most comfortable using Partial Views to provide the same functionality. You would just add the Partial Views to each page instead of including another page.
No. It does not force you in any way.
You should really avoid server-side includes with anything newer than classic ASP. They're more difficult to debug, IIS has a hard time finding correct line numbers when there's a problem, etc. Also, I haven't looked at the order in which SSIs are processed in the request pipeline - they may not work at all with ASP.NET.
If you're moving into MVC, use RenderPartial() or RenderAction() instead. These perform essentially the same function as a server-side include, but are more inline with the spirit of the framework and provide some additional benefits, like passing models without having to declare a global variable (which should also be avoided, and I'm not sure if it is even possible under .NET scope rules).
And, no, master pages are not required, but you really should use them. Using includes to build your page layout works, but only if you don't and won't need to radically change the layout of your site at any point in the future. I'm in that boat now with a 350k line classic ASP app which used very nicely structured code and #includes to create the page layout. That was the best solution available at the time, but it's causing me a lot of headaches now (10+ years later).
With a master page you can move your ContentPlaceHolder blocks anywhere you want, whereas with #includes the final page really determines the format by the order in which the includes are placed. This also makes it pretty straightforward to create a mobile version of your site - you can create a mobile-specific master page and use the same content views.
Its a matter of choice,but for consistent look and feel across the web application, master pages give you just that. You have to take the team through the learning curve of good master page design, not only would it be useful for the current project at hand but also future projects. Good luck!
I would rather opt to go for Master pages due to the ease of use and built in support in MVC for this.
If you want to know more about it check out this tutorial: Creating Page Layouts with View Master Pages.
Grz, Kris.
Does anyone have any experience creating a skin engine for asp.net MVC? I know the suggested approach is to use flexible markup with CSS, but I would like the ability for a new view to be dropped in, and the application use that one instead of the default one.
Basically, I want to know how to tell the framework (at run time) to look into a specific folder for the views/content, and if the item isn't there to check the default locations.
I started to look into how the Oxite blog engine does it, but it seems like that might be a bit much for what I need (I am still looking through it, so I could be wrong.) Any help is appreciated.
You need to change the ViewEngine a little bit.
See this post http://bartreyserhove.blogspot.com/2009/02/building-multi-tenant-applications-with_22.html
It can be done for partials and masterpage also.
When you start creating an application or site in ASP.NET MVC, what do you do before typing in that first line of code?
I'm personally fond of creating a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application project and then cleaning out controllers/views until I have what is essentially a blank project (i.e. it runs but doesn't offer functionality). Then I start working on my model and adding controllers/views as needed.
I've also read about starter kits and sample applications but I have not yet started actively working with any of them. However, in my reading I have seen authors suggest that it might be good to start off with an existing template and build on it.
I'm trying to determine if there are better ways of starting off a project such that time is saved and/or the resulting deliverable is of higher quality.
The other things I do (I also clear out the controller/views etc)
Put an IOC in place.
Put ELMAH into the project.
Then I grab a coffee and write my first test.
Kindness,
Dan
PS: At some point I shall get around to creating a template for this so I don't redo it everytime. As soon as I decide upon my favourite IOC. :-)
I usually clear out the Content folder as well and put in place a nice CSS reset file and/or a CSS framework like the 960 grid
Before starting any type of project you must know what you want to do. So take a sheet of paper and start writing on here:
The name of your application
Enumerate the features
Make a quick draft of the domain model (entities that you are going to have)
Try finding the ways (choosing a technology) you are going to do different stuff like: data access, validation (client and server side), logging, IoC, Security, Caching etc.
Do a quick draft of all the views you are going to have in your application
Identify any other problems you might need to solve/implement/develop and think how are you going to do that
What is the best and cleanest way to implement A-B testing in asp.net mvc? That is, when we make new changes to an asp.net mvc web site, we want to test the new html/css/js with a certain subset of visitors (defined on cookie, login id, etc) and then analyze some metrics (page response time, number of pages visited, $$$ in sales, etc) afterwards to measure the level of success of the changes.
I am looking for a clean way to implement a way of choosing what view (html/css/js, etc...) to render using asp.net mvc.
Check out FairlyCertain (http://www.fairtutor.com/fairlycertain/) when you get a chance. It's a .NET A/B library that you can pretty much just drop into your project and start writing tests.
Unlike the Javascript libraries from Google and VisualWebsiteOptimizer, everything happens on the server so you don't suffer any performance, user experience or SEO issues. I've been using it in my stuff for a while now and it works quite well.
There is an A/B testing framework specifically for ASP.NET MVC. This is an open source software I wrote myself when, just like you, didn't find a free tool which works nicely with ASP.NET MVC and doesn't require much setup.
Google Content Experiments? It's a Javascript-based solution that doesn't require anything from your backend.
You include Google's Javascript on your page
The script randomly substitutes elements on your page as defined by your A/B test
Google's site shows you a nice breakdown of the results...
If you are using the spark view engine, you could probably do it with a variation of the theme filter (http://sparkviewengine.com/documentation/viewlocations#Extendingfilepatternswithdescriptorfilters). For each new visitor to the site, determine if you want them to see the existing or new version of the site and set a cookie. Wire up a descriptor filter that looks for the presence of the cookie and modify the view location to look in the folder containing the modified views. If an alternative view exists, the Spark engine will automatically render it in place of the "normal" view, otherwise it will render the normal view.
If you are using the normal WFVE, then the simplest way to manage this would be to define a folder under Views where your view alternatives live. When you want to provide an alternative view, you place it in a location that matches its position within the normal Views folder but rooted at the alternatives folder e.g. to provide an alternative to Views/Users/login.aspx place your new view at Views/Alternative/Users/login.aspx.
With a convention in place for locating your alternative views, you can extend the WebFormViewEngine and overload CreatePartialView / CreateView to inspect some aspect of the ControllerContext to determine whether to render the default or overloaded view and alter the path as appropriate e.g. changing .../Views/Users/login.aspx to .../Views/Alternative/Users/login.aspx.
I suggest you use Display Modes to achieve A/B testing.
But Display Modes just support simple problems by default.
If you already implement Display Modes in some other scenario. You can consider DisplayModeMatrix (just google it). It helps you use Display Modes more efficiency.
https://www.nuget.org/packages/DisplayModeMatrix/
Wth Display Modes you can simply delete/rename views after A/B testing to clean up your project.
I think there isn't a ready to use solution for this and you will have to improvise.
Try to override your current functionality in well defined points without breaking it. Explicitly draw a border where your regular code and A-B testing code lives.
Inversion of control principle might help a lot here too (i.e. - controller factory could provide derived controller instead of original one). For views&partialviews - you could change viewengine so it would try to look for 'MyPartialViewAB.ascx' instead of 'MyPartialView.ascx'.
And it might be a good idea to take a look what performance counters are (in case you haven't).