CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvcmodel-view-controller
Crudler
Crudler

Reputation: 2286

asp.net handing over design to another person/company

Good day, I have a project that requires that I share the design portion with a creative person, while I look after the meaty business logic (C#). Project needs to be web based and available for mass market (not an internal company system).

Can anyone recommend how best to approach this. I generally do web forms, but i would think MVC is better suited although I dont know it well. Would the design guy be able to develop with "placeholders" where I just inject my server tags, or will it require quite a bit of slicing / dicing to get my stuff into his?

I once did a php project where the designer gave me html with the $tags in it and smarty templates did all the magic for me. Can the similar principle be followed here on the MS stack? If not can you reccomend an approach?

The designer likes the idea of silverlite, but my gut tells me thats not a great idea...

Upvotes: 0

Views: 55

Answers (3)

harriyott
harriyott

Reputation: 10645

Separating the layers of the application is the right thing to do anyway, but even more so in this case. I'd recommend using MVC, and keeping the view models as simple as possible.

Depending on when different parts of the site are worked on, sometimes the design and HTML will be done first, and other times the code. If the view models are simple, then the designer can learn how to use them, especially if he is using Visual Studio (and hence auto complete). If not, providing an empty-ish view with all the view model's properties will be a good start (or inline documentation!).

Upvotes: 1

McGarnagle
McGarnagle

Reputation: 102783

I would say MVC3 with Razor is a good idea, and can be used similarly to how you described with PHP. (Silverlight is nice, but probably best avoided for public websites, because it requires a plugin that lots of people don't have.)

A couple of nice features of MVC:

  • As long as you sketch the model out beforehand, you can have two people work separately, one on the Razor views and one on the Controller logic. The designer can create mock models to work with, and you can create mock views.
  • You can defer final design of various model components by using Partial Views, which MVC will use by default throughout the application, for a given class type.

In summary, the main goal of MVC is to facilitate separation of business logic and presentation.

Upvotes: 1

themarcuz
themarcuz

Reputation: 2583

First of all, if you're planning a solution aimed for the mass market, I'd say avoid silverlight. For sure it has a minor diffusion compared to HTML, right? ;) Moreover your UI guy probably know how to style HTML, and not how to design XAML interface.

This said, I think MVC is definitely the way to go, on MS stack. You could take care of all the Controller/Model stuffs, while your UI pal can design a pretty layout. After that you simply (more or less) can inject your pieces of Model inside the page, using Html helpers and other stuff.

I personally followed this approach a bounch of times, and it's pretty efficient.

Upvotes: 2

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