Is there any graphical designer for ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I guess that most people that use Visual Studio had my same reaction when they created their first ASP.NET MVC project: where did the Design View end up?

Answer 1

If you are looking for designer to get instant feedback of the HTML/cshtml changes, this can be achieved by BrowserLink feature in Visual Studio. Fire the browser and hit the page/view you are currently designing and when you make any changes to the mark up/cshtml, hit the refresh button within Visual Studio, updates made to the code will be immediately pushed to browser.

Other alternate is to use Chrome Developer tools (F12) and using "Edit as Html" feature.

I know these alternates are not rich as native designer view support in Visual Studio, but these are some practical workarounds.

Answer 2

Yes, I had that same reaction, coming from a webforms background. I need the constant feedback of a graphical designer to let me know what effect my code is having. Learning MVC is a big enough learning curve in and of itself without having to do it blindfolded.

Now that it's 4 years later, I don't mind saying Page Inspector is built in to VS 2013. If you're still using VS 2010 in 2015, all I can say is, if you upgrade, you'll never look back.

Just right click on the code and choose View in Page Inspector. There's an Inspect button in the inspector that you can use to see where an element of the design is located in the code. It can save you beaucoup time.

EDIT

And it looks like they removed it from Visual Studio 2015 and didn't even bother to post an explanation as to why. Smh...I'll update this if I find a 3rd party solution.

Answer 3

I guess that most people that use Visual Studio had my same reaction when they created their first ASP.NET MVC project: where did the Design View end up?

Not at all. Personally I never used the design view in classic web forms and when I migrated to MVC it didn't really make any difference. And not only this, it doesn't make any sense to use it anymore. I am very happy that there is no designer messing with my code anymore. I have enough headaches with Intellisense, if you use a designer which touches the code behind the scenes things will get messy. All I need is working Intellisense which completes the tags and ideally understands HTML5.

As far as designing web pages is concerned you may take a look at the Expression tools.

Answer 4

I think they are working on that as a feature for Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview .

They clearly recognise the issue of designing JS in the designer so I suspect they realise the same applies to some designers working on MVC applications.

I was told by someone from Microsoft "I think in Blend for HTML, using interactive mode, you would probably be just fine with designing MVC or MVVM patterns"

Also check out Visual Studio Page Inspector it looks like it will do what is needed

Now use WebEssentials with BrowserLink in VS2013 or up