I didn't see an option to create a web site in the c++ area. Is there a way around this or am I just stuck with C# and VB.NET
A bit of googling turned this up, not sure how applicable it still is:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mcpp/helloworldmc.aspx
However, I'd question WHY you'd want to use C++.NET over C#, given that the languages are fairly similar at the basic level. Any perceived "speedups" would probably not be very noticable given that they both compile to the same IL, and as such are both subject to the JIT-compiler.
You can probably make your website work using C++/CLI. There is no tight coupling between a .NET page (aspx or ascx) and the language of implementation. You might even get the intellisense from within the aspx/ascx files but don't quote me on that.
So to set this up you would need to create a C++/CLI project and use managed C++ to extend Page, Control, etc classes, use HttpContext etc.
Another question is whether or not there is any point doing that. You would still be targeting .NET and calling to the same API. There won't be much performance benefit if at all and you will lose the IDE support for creating controls and you wouldn't be able to use WebForms from the designer.
Edit. If you haven't done ASP.NET before you will almost definitely be firing up a normal ASP.NET project and seeing how to implement something, which classes to extend etc. So it kind of defeats the idea of using another language.
You can, in theory, use any .NET language to build ASP.NET pages. F#, for example, is fully supported in VS 2010. Whether all languages are fully supported in the tools is another question -- particularly for a language like J# that has been deprecated beyond VS 2005 and doesn't support the full depth of features of the other languages (such as the ability to create new attributes).
At a minimum, you will need to do things like define an appropriate build provider to get things going.
Related
I'm using a Windows Form Application in Visual Studio 2013 to design a prototype for a software. I'm not a software-developer, the only purpose of the project is to communicate with the dev-team to let them know what the end-product is supposed to look like.
There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc. so I was wondering if it is possible to attach stylesheets to VB.NET projects? Thank you
There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing
control, like buttons, textboxes, etc.
NO. winforms is a really old technology that basically has no amount of built-in support for custom UIs. It is not recommended for any new projects (only to maintain legacy applications) and it will be completely useless if you're not a developer, since any sort of custom look and feel needs to be done with an ugly procedural code technique called "owner draw", which requires too much code for anything, and is unable to provide professional-looking UIs due to the lack of hardware acceleration and lack of support for pixel-independent UIs.
If you're doing a prototype (as opposed to a real application), as others have recommended, you should use design tools such as Photoshop, or maybe a quick HTML + CSS kind of approach.
Otherwise, you can easily create a modern-looking application using a technology that is the replacement of winforms, called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, for short.
There's also a design tool made specifically for this technology, called Expression Blend, which is bundled with recent versions of Visual Studio, and offers a very designer-centric approach to building UIs:
To summarize: winforms is useless. Use proper, relevant, current technology instead.
There are no such things as stylesheets in WinForms applications. You can change the appareance on a form and control basis by changing the Appearance properties.
You can create base controls and forms that have your appearance changes and then use those to create other forms to make things easier to design out the screen.
There are also 3rd party control sets that do have skins/themes, which maybe what you want but you have to purchase them first then you are limited to that control suite.
I'm building a Bridge game.
The main page, where you play the game, boast some 200 controls, like buttons that represents the 52 cards, 26 others for won / lost tricks, plenty of text fields... You name it, total some 200.
Actually its been already built and runs under Winforms model, but with the unavoidable question of implementing .NET 4.0 onto user's machine that must run Windows, and installing the software.
Hence I'm considering creating an ASP version (no PHP please, since I'm fluent in VB, and ignorant in C, Java, PHP and the likes).
Is that a "real" option or am I dreaming?
Will it run smoothly for users with a 2MB DSL connection?
Oh, by the way, no MVC please, I'm too old for that sort of sh...t :->
Can it be done? Sure.
The problem for you might be that to do it effectivly you will need to use HTML, CSS, Javascript and the like.
What most likely would be a good idea for you here would be to go the route of Silverlight. It will give you a more rich UI experience and will allow you to code in VB entirely.
I don't see using ASP.BET directly as a good option here. To make it look smooth, you would have to use javascript heavily. I thing you would be better off with Flash.
If you prefer to use pure HTML/Javascript/CSS you can create rich Web UI's by modifying the Document's Object Model (DOM). With little knowledge of Javascript and the usage of some library like: scriptaculus, prototype, sarissa, jquery, you can get rich interfaces. You should take a look at some of these libraries mainly scriptaculus because the set of animations it provides. Another javascript library made for game development is gameQuery.
With that many controls on an ASP.NET page your view state will be gigantic. If you plan on only serving up a couple of games at once then it shouldn't be a problem but you have to actually start thinking about bandwidth with that large of a viewstate. You would be better off with a DOM/jQuery type interface which displayed static images for the cards. All interaction can be handled client side and validated with a server side call.
This might be the perfect opportunity to learn javascript :). Remember each language you learn is another tool in your toolbox. The engineer with the most tools usually wins :).
Recently our newest web designer asked me why we use ASP.NET for our website. Reading through his question to the real one, I started thinking about it myself. Why are we using ASP.NET for web development?
The problem we find so far is colaboration between the design team and developers. Typically our designers create some snazzy cool look crayon laced web pages, then show them off for approval in all their glory. Once approved, the developers rip the HTML out and shove it in to ASP master and detail pages, and huzzah! out comes pretty website.
Since Dreamweaver doesn't play nice with Visual Studio, this is the same process for even small tweaks and changes. I would prefer to just write the backend and let the designers draw the pretty pictures and fancy CSS. Our current websites have plenty of reason to use ASP on nearly every page, so I can't do half in HTML, the other half in ASP.
I have no aversion to doing something else, another language, CMS platform, some other random buzzword, etc...
What are your experiences with this design situation? Are we doing it the hard way? Should we consider alternate platforms and languages? Are there any good, proven ways to allow designers to work on ASP (while still using Dreamweaver)?
Start learning Asp.net MVC as soon as possible. Designers will love you for that. :) And you'll be up to date with new development technologies that will also make your solutions much more robust and less complicated.
But otherwise. Designers should be able to read XHTML fluently. Learning asp.net semantics shouldn't be too hard. Then give then Visual Studio where they can manipulate content. As long as they know how asp.net web forms work things should be fine. They'll probably be able to do majority of things using just CSS. I know I can. Sometimes I do have to check resulting HTML, but it works.
Aside from Wicket (a java web framework), I don't know of any framework or language that would allow designers to continue to work on the design once developers have started to add logic to it.
I would suggest two things though:
Use a MVC framework - ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, Django, etc since this allows for far more separation of presentation and logic
Keep your presentation layer as stupid as possible and use helpers as much as possible or even better, put the logic in the domain objects. The view should only show or get data with absolutely no logic for processing data, this will keep the pages much more designer friendly.
I find your question very interesting because no matter what kind of technology the project uses the interfaces between the different roles will always cause some friction. I am not sure if there is a technological solution to this communication issue because the designer and developer speak literally different languages.
Depending on the skillset of your designers and developers an additional layer might help you out. I do not know how ASPX works but i am sure there will equivalents to the concepts of other technologies.
In case you have mainly static content which can be expressed in XML than you could provide the backend which delivers the content in XML with a defined Schema and your designers could describe the transformation in XHTML and CSS via XSLT. Given that your designer are capable using XHTML and CSS the addtional effort to learn XML and XSLT is not that huge. I find this solution much powerful than template languages which try to emulate the richness of the serverside scripting language in their own limited constructs. In case you have dynamic elements on the clientside like DHTML, AJAX or you name it you could define your own xml tags which are transformed to richer client side objects after the designer did their work. I guess the designer will understand the usage of these special tags and you provide the proper translation into client side objects.
I used this approach with some coworkes based on PHP. PHP was only the driver for the transformation. The content was assembled into xml with special tags which were transformed into XHTML and CSS via XSLT. Once the objects and the transformation for the different objects is defined you build up a library which can help to shorten the developement cycle of new pages of you webapplication. The benefit of the extra work is, that you designer can change the layout of the page without ever touching you server side code.
Maybe this helps.
Consider using either Expression Web or SharePoint Designer. The latter is now free.
I know you specify dreamweaver, but have you looked at Blend? It plays very nice with Visual Studio and is quite a nice app. to work with.
I'm struggling with a few in-house developers that are creating some web apps in VS 2008 using C#.
It appears that the native tools and components in VS 2008 are not being nice about creating Web Standard code.
For example, the navigation component creates items in its own table structure.
Is there anyway to make a web project from Visual Studio create nice, clean, browser friendly code?
You can use CSS Friendly Control Adapters to alter the output of the current ASP.NET controls. It's easy to set up and you don't have to change any existing source code.
If you're bound to ASP.NET WinForms, you could create you own set of controls or use 3rd party controls. There is also a XHTML configuration setting you could set to Strict, so that the controls try to render more valid core.
When you really want to write nice, clean, browser friendly code, you could take a look at ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC gives you complete control of the output, but that means you have to do all the things WinForms currently does for you, yourself...
Certainly. If a component doesn't produce markup you like, then you don't use it. It's just that simple.
Having said that, be sure to check out Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 to see if your issues have been addressed. If they haven't, then you get to complain about them in a way that might get them fixed.
VS 2008 web projects don't do anything web-standards-unfriendly. The standard ASP.NET controls (like the menu control you mentioned)? That's another story -- some use a mess of tables and javascript to do their thing.
The good news? You can use what you want of ASP.NET without having to use those controls if you don't want to.
Go MVC !!! you will have complete controle over your UI
My two cents: machine-generated code is almost never as standards-compliant as the code I write by hand, especially when you get into fancy widgets and whatnot. The obvious trade off is that writing code by hand can be tedious and time-consuming.
We've come a long ways since the dark ages of code-junk that frontpage or dreamweaver used to spit out, but even still...
In the end, your code is only ever as good as your programmers.
The Web Projects themselves are simply containers for the code that you create and a mechanism for managing and building the compiled project.
Based on my experience, the controls generated by VS comply to web standards ... that being said, browsers differ on which standards they do or do not enforce and how they enforce them. For the most part, you have a high level of control of the HTML that is output from your page. The table structure generted by the navigation control id valid HTML - you may be wanting to avoid the use of tables in which case, that particular control might not be for you.
For the most part, when you have a complex control you will need to take what you get - the HTML that is generated may not be intuitive to you and your team but that is often the price paid for the time savings gained by using a pre-built control, particularly one that is intended to service the needs of a wide variety of uses. (The same can be said for most code/script libraries you use/buy/find)
Many controls offer templating that provides you with the ability to define a template for how the resultant HTML is generated.
If you want cleaner markup, you have a few options:
a) Check out the CSS Friendly control adapters from codeplex. They help alot with certain controls.
b) Avoid the more complex server controls. There is very little one can't do nearly as effectively with a repeater and some user controls that one can't do with most any databound control for instance.
c) Try ASP.NET MVC. No neato server controls to do UI lifting, but it will let you make very, very clean UIs.
I ask this not to start anything negative. Rather, after looking at ASP.NET MVC it hit me (duh) that I am not using controls like on webforms but coding html markup by hand (gasp.)
Is this a move backwards? I remember coming from classic asp to asp.net and dragging and dropping controls, creating a bll, etc. now it seems I am doing all that by hand, again, like classic, except I have good mvc design.
I guess I'm trying to figure out why this is a move forwards from what was a rapid development environment to what appears to be more tedious.
EDIT:
I always thought Visual Studio .NET was one huge reason to go with ASP.NET with all its controls and automation. Now with MVC it is makes me think it's just like any other MVC with a decent IDE, since I'm doing everything by hand now.
"Classic" ASP.NET hasn't gone anywhere - you can still use it if that's what you want or need
Though you may or may not get "drag-and-drop" functionality, between AutoComplete and the various render helpers you can easily get a working view in minutes
Creating the views is only a small fraction of the overall project
Even in ASP.NET I rarely used the visual editor. I always felt that it got in my way and made decisions for me, wrongly.
Is a step forward:
the code is fully testable
you gain full control of what the server is generating
no more viewstate!
increased server response speed
less server cpu load without the WebForm's Page lifecicle
a programming model which is more close to the web (webforms aimed to bring to the web the desktop programming model).
....
Funny you should mention this - I just finished reading a chapter in "Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0" that answers this exact question.
The book they compare the difference between Web Forms and MVC as the difference between leading an orchestra and composing a song. MVC doesn't give you the same level of immediate response as web forms, however it does give you a level of granularity a lot of web developers have come to expect. It's well known that ASP.NET controls, even in their later versions, inject more HTML than is desired.
So, functionally yes it's a step back, but only because you've been given complete control over what gets put on the page. As always, pick the right language for the job.
It's a step sideways, rather than forwards or backwards; just another way of doing the same thing, with a different emphasis. With ASP.NET forms, it's easy to "draw" the page so it looks roughly like you want it to look, but it's hard to make it behave like a proper web application. With ASP.NET MVC, it's not as easy to throw together the appearance of it, but it's actually easier to make it behave like a website, with URLs that describe the content being returned in a predictable way.
Tell me about it. I'm still trying to work out why I'm subjecting myself to this. Ultimately the number #1 sell is Unit Testing. For those of us who don't subscribe to this, the advantages are few, if any, IMHO.
That said, I'm open to be convinced otherwise. I think that MVC is a good foundation, but like you say, it's very very tedious at times. The RAD system of drag/drop controls from the toolbox used to be terrible, but since vs2008 it's been quite a pleasure. I expect the major toolkit vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, ComponentOne et al will soon ship MVC friendly toolkits (I hope!).
I'm only learning it because I'm currently on a project that was built on it (not my design). Don't forget though that YOU DONT HAVE TO USE IT. Classic ASP.NET didn't disappear. :)
-Oisin
For me, getting rid of viewstate and the page life-cycle has been an addition by subtraction. :) Not to mention a boon to my knowledge of web programming because of having to get my hands "dirty".
Some people might say that ASP.Net was a step backwards in that it can constrain the flexibility of the application by locking you into using pre-built controls.
Classic ASP was immature, but it did give you very fine-grain control over the mark-up code, which many find is lacking in vanilla ASP.Net.
As I see it the ASP.Net MVC paradigm gives the developer closer control over mark-up, while still giving access to all of the advantages of the .Net framework.
I think it was a necessary step backwards, or better yet backtracking a few steps to move ahead.
The web had evolved in a direction that diverged significantly from ASP.NET's core design premise.
In the end, comparing ASP.NET to other agile web frameworks, I believe it was a case of "you can't get there from here".
I thought part of the point of the ASP.Net MVC Framework was giving the developer more control over the HTML. Something the drag-and-drop controls make a mess of.
ASP.net MVC is not for everyone or for every application (some may argue this through!). MVC is a framework you can use in its basic form or extend to your hearts content. It allows you full control over what is rendered to the user.
MVC has a number of advantages:
Seperation of concerns resulting in better testability, arguably better design and easier to modify UI
Full control over what is rendered - which can result in standards compliant, smaller, faster pages
Clearn SEO friendly URLs although ASP.net 4 has routing features
In its purest form without use of session load balances very well.
It also has some disadvantages:
Learning curve and change of thinking required
Lack of 3rd party support although this will change
Pages can look cluttered
Can be more difficult to develop certain types of controls e.g. something like a reorderable data grid or something with many steps like a wizard
I think it's a step in the right direction, but it's nowhere near as mature as WebForms. I expect to see commercial 'control' libraries before long, although it won't be drag and drop stuff.
Also, if you're using WebForms for your view engine you're missing the point, in my opinion.
One of the biggest differences is the page life cycle. This is for me the main paradigm change. Many other benefits could be addressed following good practices, although ASP.NET did not enforce them.
If you are used to WebForms and ASP.NET, MVC may seem awkward, but if you come from classic ASP, PHP, Rails o any other environment that respects the nature of the HTTP flow, its a good option. You get the benefits of a great IDE such as Visual Studio, a complete and powerful framework such as .NET (whether you use C# or VB.NET) and everything works in a more or less familiar way.
You may lose ASP.NET controls and visual designer but for many people that was more an annoyance than a benefit, depending on the type of applications you were building and your previous experience. ASP.NET was a nice transition from Winforms but for people who always worked on a web environment seemed a bit "forced".
Didn't Scott Hanselman at one point say that "MVC isn't Web Forms 4.0"? I've taken from that, that he means that MVC isn't to replace ASP .Net at all, and it is simply another option to Win Forms and Web Forms.
I do agree in that when I first started looking at MVC, I was much more reminded about classic ASP (not the .Net version) in the way that there's no code behind page, and there's more <%= whatever %> markup in the views, which threw me for a little while, as when I used ASP .Net for the first time, it was as though ASP .Net discouraged the need for such markup.
Personally, I like MVC; I think it's great, but there's a little room too for ASP .Net..!