ASP.NET MVC 4 templates in MVC 3 - asp.net-mvc-3

We are starting a new ASP.NET MVC project. The web application will be used also in a touch pad devices and therefore I am interested on ASP.NET MVC 4 Default Templates as it has feature called Adaptive Rendering and overall it seems to better starting point.
ASP.NET MVC 4 isn't yet ready for the production use, so I was thinking of using only parts of it.
Would the View side of the MVC 4 project (Layout, CSS, JavaScript) work on MVC 3 project?

Of course it does. They are all heavily CSS3 and Html5. So you need to think about browser support rather than MVC runtime dlls.
I encourage you to check the below video out. It is just for you :
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-796T

Related

Is Areas for ASP.NET Core the same as Portable Areas?

I've seen references dating back 3+ years for Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC, but then I ran across "Areas" for ASP.NET Core.
Are these the same thing?
Side question:
Is this something that is better solved with DI if you want to create an application with modularity or plugins?
Using the ASP.NET Core Application parts feature you can easily put your area's controllers/view components inside another project and then use in the main web application. It is a bit more difficult with the views and static content. I prefer to add them as resources in the same projects as area controllers are located and then implement the IFileProvider interface and assign my implementation to the IHostingEnvironment.WebRootFileProvider property.
You can use ExtCore framework to make this all automatically.

Should I use App_Themes or Content/themes in MVC4?

Up until now I had been using MVC3 for my apps but with the new update of Visual Studio 2012 I got MVC4. I migrated a few of my apps and now they are broken.
I noticed that the new project template for an Internet application creates a ~/Content/themes/base folder.
And yet, up until now I had been accustomed to use the App_Themes folder for that. In fact, with VS.2013 you can use "Add ASP.NET FOlder | Themes".
So I am now confused with MVC4, has It deprecated the App_Themes folder (which seems more appropriate to me than ~/Content) ? or is there a significant difference?
App_Theme come from ASP.NET Platform and one goal of mvc is get a clean html code
One of the things that ASP.NET MVC is missing is the ability to
easily implement Themes. The older, more mature standard ASP.NET
framework includes theme support via the App_Themes folder; however
limited it can be, it’s still more than ASP.NET MVC currently has.
Well, at least until I wrote this little custom ViewEngine and
ControllerBase class to help out and allow us to very easily implement
Themes within our ASP.NET MVC applications
take a look this helpful article this link

Missing Single Page Application template in MVC4 RC

When I installed MVC4 beta on a development PC, it had a template for SPA (Single Page Application). Today on a different PC with the same setup (VS2010 SP1, win7), I installed MVC4 RC but no longer is the SPA template available (see image). Any one else having this issue? or is this a documented change that I could not find?
Changes from ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta
The major changes from ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta in this release are summarized below:
Removed ASP.NET Single Page Application: ASP.NET Single Page Application (SPA) shipped with ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta as an early preview of the experience for building applications that include significant client-side interactions using JavaScript. SPA won’t ship with the final MVC 4 release, but will continue to evolve outside of the MVC 4 release. Check out the ASP.NET SPA home page for details.
...
http://www.asp.net/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes
P.S., Wow I am glad that I didn't use it for an app I build right now. I was considering it 3 months ago, but decided not to risk it because MS said that it is experimental.
You can get the SPA template in the Fall 2012 update. More information on the template here and here.
It`s very risky now
For example if you try to run it with System.json for serialization it runs well with WebApi and DBDATAContext methods but it`s impossible to use it with Entities relationship entity circular errors and so on. (There is a solution to change private access of method get, but would be too much work to have to change in all the access methos of all your entities.

ASP.NET MVC3 CSS framework

I'm wondering, which css framework is best suitable for ASP.NET MVC 3?
I've tried yaml and it has several drawbacks in my opinion, at least using with ASP.NET MVC 3:
uses inputs for buttons by default (so, not compatible with jquery ui, because jquery ui uses buttons in dialogs for example).
you need to adjust css for ASP.NET MVC 3 validation.
I don't like how they describe forms (well that is may be only my
subjective opinion regarding this, anyway you need to use custom
editors if you wish stick to yaml css style).
some css class names are not very intuitive.
Nothing, that would be show stoppers, but maybe there's better alternative - something, that is adapted for ASP.NET MVC specifics, or may be ASP.NET MVC project stub, adapted to yaml css framework.
Update: OOCSS looking good, is lightweight and good structured, worth checking out.
Update 2: TwitterBootstrap is getting popular too, you can get it for asp.net mvc here http://nuget.org/packages/Twitter.Bootstrap
I have used both Blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) and 960Grid (http://960.gs/) quite successfully with MVC.
But more recently I am leaning towards "BlueLess" (https://github.com/michaek/blueless) - a ".LESS" (http://lesscss.org/) version of Blueprint together with the simply excellent "Chirpy" (http://chirpy.codeplex.com/) VS2010 add-in which automagically converts and minimises CSS, Javascript, LESS, CoffeeScript etc. quite transparently. A simply wonderful tool.
Both Blueprint and 960Grid are for layout and typography ... for form design/styling I would look at the standard JQuery UI framework (http://jqueryui.com/) .. or perhaps the Telerik MVC Extensions (http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-mvc.aspx)
Hope this helps.

Sitecore and MVC3

I am starting a project with Sitecore, I have looked for different possibilities. I have some experience with MVC but I don't understand why you want to combine this with Sitecore (6.4).
What are the benefits? Are there any examples of the implementation of (the code of) this (not the configuration on: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/64/integrating%20an%20asp.net%20mvc%20web%20application%20in%20sitecore%20cms-usletter.pdf)?
Or why shouldn't I use MVC with Sitecore?
So when should I use Sitecore 6.4 with MVC3 and when not? And are there any (code)examples?
Thanks in advance!
I've successfully implemented my own MVP implementation using Sitecore. MVP is a bit more forgiving than MVC, and can easily be integrated into web forms based applications. I used T4 templates to generate Models directly from Sitecore templates using the built-in webservices which worked really well.
Sitecore doesn't support MVC yet (in the recommended release), and trying to make it work is probably not worth the effort. I believe they are working on a version that supports MVC properly, which may be the link you provided. However it's probably also very new and there is a lot of functionality in the old version that relies on web forms. I'd like to see it working under MVC in an official capacity for a few more iterations.
Implementing patterns such as MVC and MVP are all about separating concerns and making your presentation layer unit testable. It also encourages more elegant design.
Just reading the doc it looks like this is a guide for running Sitecore in parallel with MVC. I can't see anything about new rendering mechanisms for Sitecore, which would make templating difficult in anything other than web forms. It would however allow you to use the Sitecore API to build your own templates via MVC Views, but you would loose the inline editing functionality that you get out-of-the-box with web forms.
Using mvp is probably the simplest way to go. I wrote a blog post about it here.
However, we have used MVC3 with Razor before and it worked very well. The only issue is you lose the ability to use Page edit mode as you have to do some hacking of sitecore to get it to work. I'm contemplating writing a blog post about it if people are interested.
Just to follow up.. MVC is now supported in 6.6, which will be released on November 5th 2012. We just saw a demo from John West at the Sitecore Symposium and it looks like a great framework. One of the best things about it is that you can use MVC side-by-side with Web Forms. You don't have to make an all-in bet for MVC, you can just slowly migrate or build new components in MVC, while still running Web Forms throughout your site.

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