Are there any recommendations for a design surface (or design tool) that could be used by a designer (the dude/dudette with the black turtleneck) in the process of building an ASP.Net MVC application?
Such that once there is agreement on the structure of the Model, and the interactions required by the app, then the designer goes away and builds out the UI (V in MVC) using this design tool, while the developer goes away and builds out the code (M&C in MVC) using Visual Studio.
As I understand it now, this designer person would also need to use Visual Studio and build the Views using Razor (or other view engine) syntax, instead of having the ability to build the Views using a design surface with drag-drop layout and property settings and the like.
I think you could ask them to give you a harcoded HTML for each view... then, you replace the harcoded data once you place it in Razor.
That is the beauty of Razor... it is very easy to pass from fixed HTML to a razor view.
Razor requires programming, and creating views is not an arbitrary task. I'd let the designer work in whatever program they like where they can excel about design and let the programmers worry about how best to create the views and programming in Razor (which is really just C#/VB with some extra syntax).
It depends.. what kind of skills does your designer have? Are they a true designer (no JS/jQuery/etc knowledge.. they live & breath PSDs) or are they a designer/front end engineer (they know js/jQuery, the diff. between IE7 and IE9 from a rendering pov).
If you've got a true designer then the best thing to get would be HTML. A PSD would be okay as well but if they can convert their design into HTML they've done a lot of the hard work for you (unless you love figuring out floats and margins and all that jazz). That said if you're using something like Twitter Bootstrap or Blueprint CSS then they would obviously have to know how to use that as well.
If you're lucky enough to have a designer/front end engineer then it's well worth your time to teach them some basic razor synax like #Url.Action and #Html.BeginForm. They can tell you the actions they need and you can work together by giving them a fake data/response version first which they can use while you create a real version. And in this case they can either use Visual Studio OR you can set it up so that they have your site hosted via IIS on their machine and they just use your source control to get latest which automatically gets placed in the right directory. Then they can just continue working in whatever editor they prefer as they should only be working in html which will get updated live. That said if you're using ASP.Net MVC 4 bundling you'll have to decide how to maintain bundles.
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I have an old Umbraco web application which was upgraded to v6 earlier this year.
It uses .NET ascx user controls and your standard .master pages as you'd expect.
I now need to create a brand new page which is essentially a booking form for an event.
I'd like to create it using MVC, as I do everything with MVC nowadays. I don't really want to duplicate the page layout / the frame. Is it possible to embed an MVC partial view inside the old master templates?
You can create the form in a .cshtml file and then add it as an Umbraco Macro. But the form couldn't use the MVC approach, it would have to be basic inline razor plus conditional statements. Which is fine but limiting. You could of course have the form posting to a controller action too but this get's a little tricky as it takes the form processing out of the page's event cycle.
Otherwise you are asking if you can reference an action in a masterpage, so no not really. I say "not really" because of course you can but it's unnatural and would make the project a nightmare for anyone to undestand of they were to pick it up. There is an article here as to how you might do it tho': http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MixingRazorViewsAndWebFormsMasterPagesWithASPNETMVC3.aspx
Also, there is also the Umbraco MvcBridge package. This was something a lot of devs used prior to being able to build directly in MVC. Essentially you can set up Macros to point to actions etc. but still within the webforms mode.
It's a great half-way house but I'm not sure abut the compatibility with v6.
I am using MVC 4.I have designed a webpage in Dreamweaver and then tried to convert it as a razor page. I wanted to view it in a browser, without using Visual Studio. I have heard that a Razor page can be edited using a notepad.
Please help, I am comfortable designing pages in Dreamweaver, than in Visual Studio.
If I understand you correctly you have a HTML design (created in whichever tool you prefer) and you wish to create an MVC website out of this. You have experience in ASP.NET Webforms.
Primarily to creating anything I would follow the topics covered in the ASP.NET MVC tutorials of MVC itself. It's not about "default templates" it's about understanding what builds your final output. Layouts, partial renderings etc...
See http://www.asp.net/mvc
PS: Ask yourself: Is MVC the right choice for my solution? (because I get the feeling everyone just wants to use MVC and doesn't think about what it is and why you should or shouldn't use it...)
If you dont't want to use default template then you can include your css files you created in Content folder. In shared folder which is located inside Views folder you can create the your customized layout which uses the css that you included in Content folder. And you can then include these layout in the views you later create inside shared folder of Views.
You can explore yourself by installing twitter.bootstrap.mvc4.sample from package manager console and see how your project changes.
This package changes your default layout to different layout, which is pretty cool.
Hope you can get idea of what is done and how you include your own layout from this above mentioned package.
I've inherited an MVC3 project that has a large number of ASPX views that I would like to convert to Razor. This question => Aspx to Razor syntax converter? is similar to mine, and it helped me find a bunch of options for converting the views themselves, but I'm unclear on the steps I need to take in addition to converting the views.
The first known limitation of Telerik's razor-converter is "The tool only works with views and does not deal with the project structure and master pages". This tool claims to be able to convert master pages as well, but it doesn't look like anybody beyond the developer has ever used it.
I think these are the steps I need to take:
Use a utility to convert the views
Convert the master pages manually (how do I do this?)
Modify the project structure (what needs to be modified?)
Delete the ASPX files
Test the application (any specific gotchas I should look out for?)
Are these the right steps? Can you help me with my questions on steps 2 and 3?
I have only tried this on one solution and the actual conversion did a fairly good job. I downloaded the Telerik converter project, compiled it, and then converted my projects using these command lines:
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.ascx C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.aspx C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.master C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
I only needed to go back to add an #include for a namespace here and there, and to add a few parenthesis to force the Razor view engine to recognize my inline code properly. This was also a fairly simple solution, so YMMV. But even if it converted 80-90% of your views successfully, it's that much less manual work which you would have to perform yourself. From here, you could also create a _ViewStart.cshtml file and make a few minor adjustments to take advantage of Razor-specific layout features. (Check out Scott Gu's post on it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/22/asp-net-mvc-3-layouts.aspx)
The big issue I had was trying to reconcile the file changes with source control. Since the classic MVC view engine uses .aspx, .ascx, and .master extensions, I had to manually add the .cshtml files to my MVC web project and source control then remove the old versions. It wasn't difficult, just time-consuming.
In addition, you may need to add all of the necessary web.config entries to support the Razor view engine as well if your project was created using MVC 1 or 2. Projects created with MVC 3 should already have these entries in place, even if it was not originally created as a Razor site.
This stems from my question that i started at MVC Beginner Question
Im now confident in developing a MVC website from the MVC side of things.
My fatal floor now is the UI level designing. i.e. designing views and master pages including css styling.
Just wanting to get any advice on where i should start? Im currently about to look at the expression studio to see if that will help.
I need to get up and running in this quickly so that it doesnt hold back the development of the website.
Thanks in advance
I would look at a CSS grid-framework like 960 Grid System or Blueprint.
There is often controversy from CSS/Markup purists as to whether the use of such frameworks is valid, but they often overlook that not everyone is a CSS expert. I have found that the use of these frameworks has saved me hours of productivity since my CSS skills (as a programmer) are not that great.
As far as using Expression, I tend to use this as a "test-bed" with simple HTML files. The Designer and CSS Style support seem to be more interactive than that which Visual Studio supports, so for quick mock-ups -- Expression, then move that HTML/CSS over to VS as soon as possible.
One other priceless tool to use while designing is the add-on "Firebug" for Firefox ... it allows you to inspect single elements on your page, the CSS properties affecting that element - it even allows you to change CSS attributes "on-the-fly" to immediately see the ramificatiions. This tool has saved me HOURS!
Consider finding a suitable theme in a free open source template.
Consider something that suits at http://www.freecsstemplates.org/.
I have an Umbraco website that I want to extend. I feel that ASP.Net MVC is the way to go for the extension I'm writing - I particularly like the idea of a Portable Area from MVCContrib. What I'm wondering is, how straightforward would it be to incorporate the Portable Area into Umbraco without recompiling the source?
More generally, is it possible to wire a portable area into an existing application just by modifying web.config? I'm thinking along the lines of creating a HttpModule and including that in web.config.
No, portable areas require a VirtualPathProvider to be set. VirtualPathProviders must be configured via code.
You could try some hacktastic approach using the App_Code folder. It may work.
The current version of Umbraco (4.x) is based on the web-forms model so it won't be easy incorporating MVC into it (though I believe Umbraco 5 - still in planning - will be MVC based).
Generally you either user XSLT or web-form User Controls to add functionality to an Umbraco site. However, I'm not clear what the "extension" you are writing actually does? Perhaps you could expand upon what it is designed to achieve?