Question

I work for a web company and the programmer is working on a web application that is currently being built with the MVC framework. As a front end developer I will be needing to do the html, jquery and css for this application.

The setup consists of views with cshtml files. My question here is what is the best way to develop as a front end guy with this kind of set up?

I am currently opening the files up in dreamweaver and editing the css and html this way, saving and uploading the file to our development server. I then go in to the browser refresh and see my changes.

I am using bootstrap with less, if this counts for anything. Another problem is that cshtml files don’t go well with dreamweaver, I may as well just be using a plain text editor, but the only thing that I like about dreamweaver is the auto upload to FTP on save feature which saves me loads of time.

Surely there is a better way to go about editing these cshtml files? Or is the best way for this kind of stuff? I am very curious to hear how other people would go about doing this kind of work.

Thanks, any input is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

TL;DR

• I would suggest that you do the Web Design first, at least in
  prototype format (your deliverables will be html and css, and maybe
  some js)
• The .net dev team then does the cshtml work, integrating your design
• You then need to both be involved during the review and fixing of the
  result

In more detail

AFAIK there is still no WYSIWYG editor for Razor .cshtml files, so they need to be hand crafted.

I would recommend that you (as the web designer) provide the dev team with html + css prototypes of each web page in as plain html as possible, (i.e. all html elements with the necessary classes + id’s, and possibly also at least a first pass at the js / jquery needed). Also, indicate the common bits of the pages so that the dev can extract Layouts / master pages and Partial Views etc.

The rationale here is that there is little point in trying to code .cshtml unless you have .net experience as well as IIS or Cassini on hand, as the code needs to be debugged. The shortcomings of FTP’ing up to your server will be obvious if you break the razor code while changing html.

It then becomes the dev team’s job to ensure that the html generated by the .cshtml matches your html layouts.

Remember to keep your html as clean as possible, with all the styling in css.

With time and experience, you also should be able to get to grips with the razor syntax and then you and the dev team can shift the responsibilities so that you agree on the data being passed to and from the MVC controllers (ViewModels, ViewBags, TempData, and Post data / Json etc), and then you can lay out the html in cshtml yourself?