I'm a long time winforms developer and one of the things I really liked was the layout manager controls they had like flowlayoutpanel or gridlayout. unfortunately these don't seem to exist in asp.net or do they?
I'm in the process of modifying my existing asp.net website to use css instead of tables, but when I go into the visual studio design mode it looks terrible.
It's really difficult to wrap my head around all these floats, div:clears and css tricks and then test and retest in every browser. Surely there must be a better way. Ideally a layout manager control which would display properly in design mode, act as a container, be lightweight, and use smart enough to emit tables or css depending on the browser abilities.
does such a control exist as part of asp.net, open source, or commercial add-on?
Using tables instead of DIVs and css can certainly help with laying things out (a lot of people will think this is bad practice, but its works)
Also, have a look at the asp.net Repeater and ListView components. The ListView is very good in that you have a lot of control over the layout and the rendered html, I would look at that.
First thing - don't rely on the VS Designer. It's not a browser. Because each browser implements css in potentially different ways, your only option is to test in the browsers that you think your target market will use.
At first, css positioning can seem a bit confusing, but if you stick with it, you will be able to wrap your head around it. There is no such control as you describe that I know of. CSS is part of a web developers required learning, just as SQL is if you need to use a database etc.
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I've recently decided to create a web app to host some algorithms - I normally just create them without care for UI. However this time I need to dive deep into UI. I'm familiar with bootstrap, css, asp.net and have made a good start.
I'm finding it very difficult to deal with asp.net controls in the design view and having too much trouble trying to achieve simple tasks such as moving controls to different areas of the webpage. When I have two textboxes the design view forces one on top of the other leaving me so confused. Then when I try to move my bootstrap button it randomly creates paragraphs and refuses to move the button!
I'm looking for some genuine sincere advise on how I would deal with the design view on asp.net when moving controls and what the best techniques are. Also advice on how to make a modern UI, best techniques (perhaps bootstrap mentions) etc...
I am creating a fairly simple data display app in asp.net (visual studio 2015) - (most of the algorithm complexity is going to be behind the scenes and nothing to do with UI). Comprehensive and detailed advice would be really appreciated. Specifically modern good looking UI in relation to data grids, textboxes for user input (as parameters), dropdowns - you know the typical data app.
I'm sure this will be greatly helpful to many others as well!
Yeah, as I web designer who has had to work with asp.net in the past I completely feel your pain. It's not easy to get a modern look mostly because asp.net isn't a modern tool and kind of has a visual vocabulary all its own.
That said, I found I could get decent results by sticking as close to CSS based solutions as I possibly could. You can see some of those results in the following links:
http://www.design-experiments.com/
http://www.troyjnorris.com/shoppingcart/
I found that a minimalist approach tends to come with the best results.
A good process to follow:
- Build what you want to build.
- Add container divs to make selecting elements easier around your controls. This will greatly improve your ability to position elements the way you want.
- Use your browser inspector to figure out the auto generated element names as they appear on the screen. Getting good selectors is half the battle in CSS.
- Rip out the styling you don't like. Standard reset style sheets won't do here. You'll have to build your own to zero everything out on the elements you want to style so you're not fighting the out of the box look of the controls. Again you have to rely heavly on your inspector in a web browser to see what styles everything is inheriting.
- Use google fonts to define visual style of the page.
- Stick to mostly black or white backgrounds.
- Bootstrap is helpful for a responsive grid, but won't do much good attempting to style most of the elements on a page as they're not meant for that.
- As you might have noticed in the examples above the visual interest comes from elements that are unrelated to the asp.net structure and limitations. So have something like that, even a background image or some paralax so it feels like something is going on on the page.
Hope that helps.
I am designing the user interface of a web application but I am inexperienced with UI Design, I just drag and drop labels and textboxes, but they look not symetric and properly arranged on the page. In a windows application, user interface design is easier since the visual stuido helps you with location of controls, but I don't know how to do that in a web application. Is the only solution entering the html and using lots of space characters for the page to look well organised ? This just makes me feel like an amateur.
Web apps are styled using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is used for every aspect of UI in web apps. This is not limited to just ASP.NET, but to web development in general.
ASP.NET, and Visual Studio (or other IDEs) may allow you a familiar drag-and-drop interface for creating the UI, but under the hood, ASP.NET and these tools simply generate css for styling.
For example, in Visual Studio 2010, you can select "Change positioning to absolute for controls added using Tooldbox, paste, or drag and drop." in the HTML Designer Options
You can use these tool to drag and drop elements if you like, but I strongly recommend against even starting down that road for several reasons:
Unless you understand css, you will struggle with otherwise simple positioning and styling issues. The drag/drop tools and properties exposed are often not sufficient.
Web design is vastly different thatn WinForms design. You need to deal with many more screen resolutions, and browser resizes, which need to be fluid. Absolute positioning is horrible for this.
Once you learn the wrong way, it's very hard to change your ways. It's better to learn the "right way" up front.
There's a relatively simple CSS tutorial here.
I'm sorry there isn't a quick and easy answer,but if you're going to do web development at all, you need to learn to use css properly, and there's quite a bit to learn. Hopefully this tutorial will be a gentle introduction.
If you don't like that one, try this Bing search.
On most projects I've been one, designers has produced HTML code, then developers turned it into ASP.NET, including master-pages etc that should really be a part of design.
After it has become ASP.NET, designers could not work on the code with their tools.
I know that a lot of the design of ASP.NET is made with the purpose of separating code and design, and in principle designers should be able to work on design aspects with the Visual Web Developer, but I've never seen a designer using VWD.
How is cooperation done in practice, and what is about the best one can expect from a designer?
From someone who does both:
Most of the design should be done with CSS, so this isn't a problem.
The layout of the page, therefore, comes down to elements with IDs and classes (simplistically speaking).
I try to keep these IDs and classes as is, and place ContentPlaceHolders inside them as needed, when possible, and create controls or skins with the right classes.
Optimally, designers and programmers should work together, and know each others limitations and requirements (this cannot always be done, sometimes these are done by different companies). I think most of the responsibility here lies on the developers - they need the right controls to get the expected output.
Frankly, a web designer should care about HTML and CSS, not about what server-side technology is used to deliver them. The best I would expect from a web designer is to write flexible CSS, that can take a view changes to the HTML structure without breaking (that is - extra divs or tables, as ASP.NET tends to do).
A good ASP.NET developer will intelligently use the set of controls available. For example, in most cases, the ListView will do everything the GridView can, and produce clean, SEO-friendly markup.
In the ASP.NET environment, I would encourage the use of Expression by designers. Business owners can avail of the new deal from Microsoft and obtain VS, Expression, etc., for $100 for three years.
I think both developers and designers have to embrace each others world for anything to work.
We are still stuck with the old fashioned way of the designer producing PSD documents and hopefully rendering them into HTML.
Then we take them over and convert them to .Net, then the designer requests a change and we go in circles for a while before coming to an acceptable solution.
It would be nice if the designer could integrate into the HTML of .Net easier but I don't see that happening for a while, not while Microsoft advocates using scripting in your development..
I've found that using ASP.NET MVC will make the designer's job much easier. Especially if you stay away from using things like HTML.RenderImage, and instead place an IMG tag on the page with <%= ViewData["MyImage"] %> as the src. This will allow the designer to see the html they like and understand, while giving you the flexibility to set the source(which is all the developer should be doing). The goal being to stay away from ASP.NET controls, which would confuse a designer, while still keeping their flexibility to develop quickly.
Our organization has dedicated designers who design the page and cut it up in Dreamweaver. That's worked well in the past with ASP and PHP sites. Now we're trying to make it work with .NET, but are struggling because of the structure of a project in ASP.NET. How does everybody collaborate with developers? The specific points I am looking for are:
-Transferring Dreamweaver content to Visual Studio
-Changing HTML inputs to server controls
-Giving designer access to finished Visual Studio product so they can tweak layout
Thanks!
Obviously, there will be a slight learning curve for your designers. But with that said, I have worked quite often with designers (none of whom used Dreamweaver, btw, so that may be part of the problem) on asp.net sites. Usually, they will create the HTML exactly how they want it on the server like a static HTML page, then I will go in and replace form fields manually with asp.net controls.
On an aside, I have found that I have the best chance of matching the design using controls that spit out the least HTML, such as Repeaters instead of DataGrids.
Once the site is up on the server and programmed, they can go back in an tweak things if need be.
Also, just like we have to adapt to them a bit (making our server controls spit out html how they like it) they also have to adapt to us a bit and not rely as heavily on id attributes in their stylesheets as some items id attributes will be controlled by hte .net runtime since they are controls.
MOre often than not, a designer new to asp.net will feel very threatened by this new way of doing things, specially with user controls instad of include files, but its really not that different than classic asp/php development is.
The key to the solution of all your problems in this matter is quite simple, and yet so hard to fulfill: it's usually called semantic markup. If you can make sure that the designers to start with make their html semantic, and that the .Net programmers keep rendering the same markup but with their server controls where needed, the tweaking won't be a problem - the markup is the same.
So what is semantic html, then? you may ask. Well, it's not always as simple as one would like it to be. A good start is to make every page pass XHTML validation.
In my experience, designer-created HTML almost always needs to be at least refactored, if not rewritten. So, open a browser with the original HTML on the left, and try to match it as closely as possible in VS on the right screen.
Giving designers access to ASP markup is not a good idea, imho. Too much can go wrong if you only understand half of the tags you are manipulating.
How about using one of Microsoft Expressions line of products? I've heard they are to .NET what dreamweaver is to PHP/ASP.
Looking for some direction here as I'm running into some migration problems.
We have a legacy application. The 'infrastructure' is running just fine. Business logic and data access layers written in VB calling SQL Server for the database.
I have a LOT of experience writing Winforms (desktop) application and have had no problems. However, the last time I wrote any ASP.NET stuff was in 1.1 (VS.NET 2003).
Among other things, for ASP.NET 2.0 and up, the Grid layout is gone. It's not just a simple case of dropping controls on a form, aligning them, ordering them and working with the code-behind anymore.
The new web-based application is starting out pretty simple. Just a common header (already made a user control for that) and footer with your typical CRUD functions in the middle.
I tried being 'intuative' in using a master page with content place holders but I couldn't get the placeholders to "grow", to say nothing of not being able to put a text box where I wanted one. Oh, I found the option in VS2008 to allow absolute positioning but it only worked for SOME controls - others I had to manually edit the asp tags.
Then I saw examples using div's and tried to implement them but I ended up with results that had objects writing on top of each other. The online help wasn't helpful to say the least.
Does anyone know of a good book, website or tutorial that can give the basics of what I'm looking for? In practice, I'm looking to make simple pages where some objects may have to push others gurther down the y-axis (as in, several comments being made and that section would push the section listing the 'attachments' down further). I have no trouble when it comes to all the other aspects of this application. It just appears that my webforms skills are about 3-4 years out of date.
This isn't going to be some fancy flash/silverlight application - just simple 'data maintenance' to get rid of some ugly and bug-prone processes involving reading common mailboxes and decoding Word files. The new goal is to have a nice weborm with proper validation.
I guess what I'm looking for is a "Webforms for Winforms programmers" book or site.
Help!
Thanks in advance.
The best advice I've heard on learning to use html/css layout goes something like this:
When building a new page, don't try to get all fancy up front. Start by building a very basic, text-only page. It should look like something from 1996- that brief period where everyone had just discovered the web but had not yet started using the table tag for layout- only no comic sans font. Don't use images at this point, unless the image is genuinely a part of the information being conveyed (as opposed to the window dressing to make it look pretty: you can add those later). There will likely be an h1 at the top of the page, and give each sub heading an appropriate hN, but at this point there shouldn't be any layout information in the page at all. The only place you'll have a table tag is if you genuinely have tabular data to show. If it helps you write this code then you can wrap everything in old-fashioned <center> tags for now- just don't forget to remove them later.
Now let's start tweaking the markup a little. Use things like ul (unordered list) for your list of navigation links and label/legend to identify and group your form areas. The general idea here is to have each element on the page encased in the most appropriate html tag, and to use the full set of available tags- each for it's designated purpose.
At this point you have a page that is ideally suited for a screen reader or search engine. By building this page first, you have made SEO and accessibility compliance easy on yourself. Of course those aren't the only requirements, so we're not done yet.
Now you need to identify the different sections of your page, from both the layout and logical perspectives. The page should largely already be divided logically, but you may find a few places where the normal tags don't cut it. You'll also want to group certain elements for layout reasons. Encase each of these areas with a div tag, and give the tag a class name that refers to the purpose for the tag: the group your are creating. This is just another case of using the a tag (the "division" tag) for it's intended purpose. Also, since elements can have more than one class, you may want to think about also grouping your classes logically. For example, you might want to have a separate class that distinguishes the site template from the rest of the page.
By and large this should not have changed the appearance of the page, but now you have something where it should be very easy to start adding styles. At this point you can now start adding images and layout. The goal here, though, is to change the actual markup as little as possible. If you can manage it only add ids and classes, though you will likely need to add an additional span or div that you had not identified earlier, and sometimes you'll need an extra block level element to force a compatible layout across browsers.
If things are done correctly, the result is a page that not only looks good, but is also easier to work with when testing across browsers, will naturally degrade well when a style or javascript feature isn't supported, and scores well for SEO and accessibility. This also makes it easier to have a developer build a simple page that provides a certain level of functionality, which they can this pass off to a separate designer to make it look good.
You may also want to check out A List Apart. This is a great website with lots of "tricks" for using CSS to layout things on the web along with lots of other web oriented content.
Grid positioning was an abomination for websites. Sure it made for an easy transition from those familiar with the WinForms designer, but it produced horride HTML that is nearly impossible to maintain.
The very best resource I can recommend to you is CSS Mastery. You'll need to learn HTML and CSS, but they're quite easy to get into.
By the sounds of it, you're looking for a crash course in HTML ?
the "Design Canvas" of an ASP.NET aspx Page & ascx Control is just HTML tag markup.
If you've no web design experience, I'd recommend starting somewhere like
W3Schools
When Microsoft gave us ASP.NET, they tried to make programming websites, more like programming rich client applications. However, there are a lot of issues you have to deal with, the major one being statelessness, when developing for the web that don't exist when developing a thick client app (WinForms). So the first step is to not think of the two as similar in anyway.
The drag and drop tools are nice, but what you really need to understand is HTML and client server models. HTML will help you understand how things are getting laid out, and client server models are important to understand how data gets to and from the web to the server. If you have developed in ASP.NET 1.1, then things really haven't changed for 2.0. The concepts are the same, just some of the provided controls have changed.
A lot of people were really unhappy with the grid-based layout from 1.1, because it didn't really work in a number of situations. It still has to ultimately render as html, and html just isn't suited to that kind of layout. For example, things might not be ordered properly or pushed off the screen for mobile browsers (iPhone, etc). There's also things like screen readers for the blind. If you work for the government, that 2nd item is a legal requirement rather than just a nice-to-have, and there are a lot of developers who do work for the government.
So ASP.Net 2.0 tried to generate markup that's at least a little nicer for html. The downside is that you actually have to understand html layout now. But, c'mon: you're building a web site. If you can't handle a little html you're in real trouble.
My advice to build one static page using something other than visual studio. Use <input tags rather than server controls on that page and don't actually implement any logic. Use it to understand how your layout will need to work. Once you have that down, it's really easy to duplicate that for your pages in Visual Studio.
This doesn't really belong as a separate answer, but I wasn't sure you were likely to see another comment to my response above.
The normal behavior of all block-level elements, including divs, is for each new element to appear below the previous element. It sounds like you've set position:absolute; on everything, perhaps while playing with the Grid-based layout option in visual studio. Don't do that- it's hijacked the expected behavior and that's why you see everything piled on top of each other.