Hi All, Im just starting to make my first ever asp MVC website. Im just wanting advice on 3rd party controls that I could utilize to make the job a bit easier.
The graphics designer has done all work in photoshop (logos, layout prototypes etc) which i will have to translate to the webpage.
While its not a graphics intense website there is still a lot of layout work to do.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
As far as I know, also being new to MVC - if you want the convenience of 3rd party controls, drop mvc and use webforms. If you want to cut back on markup and 'tag soup' as I've heard it called, check out using a custom viewengine. The release candidate of MVC3 is out and I believe it has the Razor view engine, which is a mix of c# and xhtml.
See: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/02/introducing-razor.aspx
Hope that helps!
EDIT
In response to some comments about my post - I recommended he drop mvc and switch to webforms because of the amount of user controls for webforms. I was under the impression that I could ignore everything in the 'toolbox' tab in visual studio once i switched to using MVC because it didn't use controls the same way.
If you were just looking for easy ways of adding some 'zazz' to your site, why not use a javascript library like jQuery, I use it extensively on my MVC site and there are tons of plugins for it such as wysiwyg html editors, image crop tools and anything else you need. Sorry if saying 'drop mvc' caught you off guard. I love MVC.
Not sure why @Gallen recommends dropping MVC, here are some examples of commercial 3rd party MVC controls. Sure the MVC ecosystem isn't as big as WebForms, but the landscape is certainly better than it was a year or so ago.
That being said, if you're just laying out images then what's wrong with HTML + CSS?
Because the UI with ASP.NET MVC is not hard linked to .NET it opens up a whole range of jQuery plugins and UI controls to use. I have wrapped a lot of the jQuery UI controls in Html helpers to make it a bit easier.