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?

When using classic Web Forms to develop an application in Visual Studio, the Design View is really handy, it helps you to create user controls and other components in your webpage by simply drag and dropping the item from the toolbox to the design page. Although it does not allow positioning and advanced styling, as Dreamweaver does instead, it is a really useful feature if you want to avoid painful HTML formatting and CSS styling (or you do not have good knowledge of HTML).

Is there any way to use a graphic designer to create the View layout and then integrate the design with the "logic" part of the View (the one that uses the model to populate/submit the data from/to the controller)?

Answer 1

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.