Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery

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ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery

Posted 2009-01-05 03:49 PM in ASP.NET | ASP.NET MVC.

My teammate Stephen Walther launched the ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery a few weeks back. This stemmed from an idea ScottGu had to let the community change the default templates that ship with ASP.NET MVC. I was supposed to work on this but headed to Africa for the holidays so Stephen helped me out and took over the project and did a better job than I would have!

You can vote on the designs that you like and that you don't like. You also can contribute new designs of your own.

After you download a design from the gallery, you can use the design by following these steps:

1) Copy the files from DesignTemplateCS or DesignTemplateVB folder into your project (use DesignTemplateCS for C# projects and DesignTemplateVB for VB.NET projects)

2) Do a search and replace the string [YourProjectName]. Replace [YourProjectName] with the actual name of your project as displayed in the Solution Explorer window.

This last step is necessary to get the namespaces right. Most of the templates use helper methods to render the menu items so that the selected menu item is correctly displayed.

Microsoft also is hosting a design competition to encourage members of the community to submit new designs. Submit a new design before January 31, 2009. ScottGu will be selecting the best three designs and announcing them on his blog. Learn more about the ASP.NET MVC Design Competition and submit your designs before January 31st.

Monday, January 05, 2009 10:49:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I don't want this to sound as trolling, but now you guys need to find a way to get proper designers to submit their stuff there..is it dead easy for a designer to convert a CSS-based design into an ASP.NET MVC design? Is there an easy step-by-step tutorial somewhere, and one that does not depend on Visual Studio?

If not, all you guys will have are designs like the current ones, that look like the kind of stuff that programmers come up with, not designers.

Wookie

Monday, January 05, 2009 10:54:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

@Wookie - Actually any design can be used for ASP.NET MVC. There is no such thing as an ASP.NET MVC design, you can place some default elements like login, links to home action method, ... on any design.

@Scott: Great to see my design on your blog :-)

maartenba

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 2:21:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Come on man, you are showing no love for ASP.NET MVC. I recall the ASP.NET AJAX, there were a Mashup Contest, then a Showcase for sites that uses ASP.NET AJAX. But for ASP.NET MVC just a design contest! is it only for Designer?

kazimanzurrashid

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:18:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

@Marteenba: Sure, the thing is, this should be explained for potential designers interested on it..non-programmers might not know what to do with files like site.master etc

Wookie

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 9:00:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

@Wookie -- That's a great idea about providing guidance for designers on how to design for ASP.NET MVC websites.

@kazimanzurrashid -- We LOVE developers! We have ASP.NET MVC tutorials, videos, sample applications, and website galleries on the way. However, we know that developers also tend to not be the best designers. We want to make sure that developers have the necessary resources to make great looking ASP.NET MVC websites.

Stephen Walther

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 9:36:46 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Again, I hate to sound like I'm harping on this, and I probably know the answer already, but with the new designs, are the controls rendered within also to web standard? Or is it css shell around standard Webform (table, etc.) controls?

http://johndunagan.myopenid.com/

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:02:02 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

John Dunagan - Good question. It's a CSS Zen Garden style thing. MVC doesn't use standard WebForm controls. We're talking about DIVs, DIVs, DIVs. The markup is semantic, so you can nuts with CSS. No tables.

Scott Hanselman

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 11:15:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Thanks, Scott!

I'll be sure to tell some of the other MVC gurus here in Fla. who didn't know that when I asked them.

Hope you're feeling better since Africa.

http://johndunagan.myopenid.com/

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:11:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Hey Scott -
I have been trying for days to download October by DAvid Hauser form both work and home and just get the following error:

The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://www.asp.net/MvcGalleryFile.ashx?fileid=20...

Very nice design and I would love to be albe to use it. Can you reports this to someone?
I have no problems getting any of thge other designs from the site.

Thanks
Jim

James Evans

Thursday, January 08, 2009 8:26:23 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Hi,

This is amazing thing to learn . Moving from the regular design concepts to a newer level is good.
I welcome this things.

Thanks,
thani

http://misterfantastic.myopenid.com/

Friday, January 09, 2009 7:04:28 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I've been following ASP.NET MVC since the videos started coming out on asp.net. I'm excited to see that it's getting some good traffic. However, you just have to wonder are there plans to upgrade ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET in general to support development in HTML5? HTML5 is coming and there are already a good number of sites out that are using it. I know ASP.NET has the xhtmlconformance tag but this doesn't offer any support for HTML5.

You guys are always on about the cutting edge of applicationdevelopment, and I like that, really I do, now how about giving us an easy way to code HTML to the cutting edge by adding support for HTML 5?