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unfortunately Dreamweaver doesn't support Asp.net mvc, and I find it hard to believe that everyone is just using Visual Studio to edit their CSS files. My pages are dynamically assembled through multiple views and partial views. I'm using Visual Studio Ultimate.

It's close to impossible to achieve anything good looking when having this workflow:

  • Press F5
  • look at CSS in browser
  • decide what to change
  • abort debugging
  • change CSS
  • run again and see if the change was what I wanted. Probably not, because there are no color pickers, no live preview, nothing. I know I can use the developer tools available in browsers, but there is no drag&drop support for div containers and no color pickers either.

So my question is basically: How are others designing MVC(3) webpages?

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    Why not create the page as HTML and do your design etc. then move it into MVC? Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 13:40
  • @Neil: You are right, this is probably the only possible way. I wish there was a fully integrated way, similar to the wpf designer. Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 14:25

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I do a great deal of design work and have typically always used something like jsfiddle to mock-up CSS / HTML to check how things are looking. But for the most part use Visual Studio to edit nearly all of my CSS changes.

If things get a bit more complex I occasionally will use Expression Web. I have heard good things about Visual Web Developer (which has a free Express Version).

Just my $.02.

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Make html+css templates in your favorite editor with common controls before implementing them to functional web. Also css, javascript, cshtml and aspx files are editable while you are debugging and if you use full IIS or asp.net development server your web will keep running when you stop debugging, so you can modify your css and just press F5 in browser.

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I really don't understand why you need color pickers and a debugger for css? You already have inline code validation (underlines wrong properties) and for colors just use the paint or whatever program (I use photoshop - have to open .psd anyway before I start cutting).

All the projects I did commercial were done in VS. I did some fun pages at home in DW but I don't really see any difference. But it's true I have all code hinting and such off since the dialogs that open to hint kept slowing down my pc and lagging to much.

Point is that once you know the CSS properties by heart the editor doesn't matter. I often style new elements in notepad cause I'm to lazy to load the solution. Than I just copy paste the code in firebug and see how it looks like. Also on the fly editing without refresinhg really makes it 3x faster.

I don't see anything time consuming here. Firebug is the king.

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