Solution for web designer using an OSX to develop an ASP.NET MVC project?

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+2 Q:

Solution for web designer using an OSX to develop an ASP.NET MVC project?

The project is developed using ASP.NET MVC framework and heavily relies on .NET 3.5.

What would be the best solution to allow a web designer, who is using OSX, to develop the site's UI? Basically he would just need to edit the aspx, css and js files, but also run the web application locally.

I've thought of some possibilites:

Install parallels/vmware/bootcamp and set up everything as you would for windows. Bad: it would be slow, OSX user doesn't like working in windows
Set up Mono and run the webapp on that. Use whatever tool you want for editing the front end files. Bad: does mono support MVC framework, .NET 3.5 and database connections? Unfamiliar platform, so possibly a lot of work setting it up, if it even will work.
Run the site on a separate server, and edit the front end files via network drive. Bad: our development server is so slow that seeing the changes takes too long...

Do you have other ideas or comments for these options? Thanks!

+2 A:

You could try using a virtual machine. VirtualBox is a free one and is quite simple to setup. The only downside is that you need your own copy of Windows...

Jay 2009-11-27 14:38:37

I haven't yet tried VirtualBox but might give it a try, thanks. VMWare or Parallels are familiar so we probably pick one of those three.

Lauri Larjo 2009-11-30 19:28:14

I'm interested to know how this turns out so let me know.

Jay 2009-11-30 23:26:01

We went with VMWare Fusion and since we already had available images for it, it all went smoothly. We installed the whole Visual Studio, and web designer is using it to run the service on his local machine. His using Aptana on OSX side to edit the front end files, so it works nicely together.

Lauri Larjo 2009-12-17 15:10:43

The MVC framework is part of Mono. Ares Technica has an article about the MVC framework and running it on Mono.

While it seems that some people were able to hack the framework to work on Mono back in March and April of this year, Microsoft has since released the MVCframework as open source and it is now fully supported by Mono as of the 2.4.2 release.

Here is a link to the most recent Mono releases along with Virtual Machine images that already been pre-configured to give you the best development experience.

Good luck with your project and hope this helps some.

Chris 2009-11-27 14:44:53

MVC is built on top of webforms, it doesn't need to be part of Mono for it to work. MVC has been possible with Mono since July, 09http://www.mono-project.com/news/archive/2009/Jul-06.html

jfar 2009-11-28 03:59:54

Ooops, I mean MVC has been officially part of Mono since July, but a simple google search shows its been possible to run MVC on Mono since before MVC was even released.

jfar 2009-11-28 04:00:44

Does this also mean that program written in asp.net MVC can be run in Mono without any modifications? Mono's guide includes a very long instructions to port application to Mono (http://mono-project.com/Guide:_Porting_ASP.NET_Applications). That's not something we want to do.

Lauri Larjo 2009-11-30 18:18:07

Honestly. I'd skip trying to get a mono enviroment up and running just for one desinger. Install parallels, work with visual studio and skip the pain of jacking with the application setup. I've worked with Mac designers who had no problem working on a virtual windows setup. It's probably the simplest and most straight forward way of doing getting the project done.

Chris 2009-11-30 20:48:56

What you really need to do is have your web designer mock up the pages in static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript first (in their environment of preference.) Once that's done, adapting the markup to the ASP.NET project should be easily doable by yourself or the designer on a Windows machine (or virtual machine, your preference).

Adam Maras 2009-11-28 05:59:33

True, but we'd like to allow the designer to be involved in the development as the project goes on. Hence it's not just a one time thing.

Lauri Larjo 2009-11-30 18:15:43

ansaurus

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Solution for web designer using an OSX to develop an ASP.NET MVC project?

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