Where are the graphical page components for an ASP.NET MVC application?

Question

This sounds really stupid, but I was told that you could drag-and-drop visual components (including JavaScript or AJAX components?) onto a web page view in ASP.NET MVC and then "customize" the components by editing code behind them once they were in place. Either I misunderstood what I was told or I'm blind and don't see how to do this, but the ability to do this would help a lot, especially since I can't really design things to save my life.

EDIT 1: For clarification: The way I was told, it made it seem like you could go to a panel, drag a button over to a view area, and then the HTML/CSS to put the button there would be stubbed out. Then, you could open a code editor and tweak everything exactly how you want it to be.

Answer 1

Drag and drop is more suited to standard ASP.NET webforms, not MVC. I think you can still do it in MVC, but only if the controls do not rely on viewstate (which MVC does not support).

try Googling on "asp.net mvc user controls"

Answer 2

Even with Webforms, the Design view is pretty useless. It's nowhere near the wysiwyg editor you're envisioning for even a relatively simple website design. While you can technically drag-and-drop components onto the page, they usually bear no resemblance to the rendered html.

If you want to design website with either ASP.Net framework, you'll need to be comfortable writing markup. The upside of this is that the MVC framework makes the markup side of things greatly simplified.