ASP.NET MVC WAP, SharePoint Designer and SVN

Question

All,

I'm starting a new ASP.NET MVC project which requires some content management capabilities.

The people who will be managing the content prefer to use SharePoint Designer (successor to FrontPage) to modify content. I'd like to allow them to keep doing that.

The issues are:

1. Since I'd like this to be a WAP, not a website project, how can I allow them to see their changes in action without requiring them to have Visual Studio on their local machines? Can I specify a "default" action for a controller so that given a url like

      /products/new_view_here
   

   Can I let them save pages (views) and see them in the browser without having to go through the check-in/build/deploy process?

2. I'd like their changes to be stored in SVN; SharePoint designer seems to only support Visual SourceSafe (ugh) directly.

The ideas I've come up with so far are

1. Write an HTTP handler that implements the FrontPage Server Extensions protocol. This sounds time consuming, but I haven't yet looked at the protocol spec. However, it would allow me to perform whatever operations I want on the server side, including checking files into SVN.

2. Ditch the WAP in favor of a website project. I do not like having the source present on the server, however. Also, will MVC work in a website project?

Surely someone has tackled this problem before?

Answer 1

This seems to be pretty complex. If they are going to be making static html pages then another option besides Frontpage Extensions is to use FTP, as I recall Frontpage worked nicely over ftp. Then that would smooth over the editing portion of the problem.

I don't know what the exact technology would be but there are services that will monitor a file-system for changes, you could have it automatically commit to svn.

In this case I would have it commit to a branch, maybe for each designer, and then when they have completed some portion you, or some team member then merges their changes into the branch so that there's meaningful history other than, a series of mechanical commits that will be worthless to read.

1. Use FTP instead of Frontpage Extensions
2. Use a file system monitor to mechanically commit saves to an SVN branch
3. When milestones are reached manually merge those changes to the trunk.

Also if not FTP, then WebDAV may be a good option too. You may also need to extend the MVC framework to compile the template each pageview just for development purposes.

Good Luck!