Question

I’ve been working with a team on a ASP.NET project, a project management tool.
Most of the pages is basically writing stuff from the database to the page and store the changes which where made.

This is our first project in ASP.NET (We currently use ASP Classic for all our other projects), our senior told us not to use MVC.

The problem now is that our Designer/Front-end developer is pretty much clueless if it comes to ASP.NET, he also does not want to use VisualStudio if possible (He uses OSX).

For example:
What would for example be the best way to write a dynamic list?

This is what we currently do:

<div id="tasks" overflow-y="scroll" style="height:400px;">
   <ul id='taskList'>
     <% PrintTasks(); %>
   </ul>
</div>

In the code-behind:

public void PrintTasks()
{
        foreach (var task in _tasks)
        {
            Response.Write("<li rel='#' id='task_"+task.TaskID+"'>" +
                   ...
                "</span>" +
                "</li>");
        } 
}

In this case, its not possible for the designer to edit the li tags without going into the code behind.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In the specific case you mentionned, in ‘classical’ asp.net, you’re supposed to use a repeater: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.repeater(v=vs.80).aspx

<asp:Repeater id="Repeater1" runat="server">                       
    <ItemTemplate>
        <li rel='#' id='task_<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "TaskID") %>'>
            <span>Whatever</span>
        </li>
      </ItemTemplate>            
 </asp:Repeater>

Basically, learn which webcontrols are available, create new ones every time it’s necessary, and try to get as much as you can from asp.net webform’s limited binding/templating system.