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I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC4 site, using the Razor engine. One of the things I've discovered slowing me down is the design and styling of the site. Currently, I edit my view, load the site, dump the HTML source and then edit it with Expression Web.

This is pretty painful. It requires creating a temporary location with all the right css files, creating 'fake' html pages and then loading them up in the editor to get the look I want then editing my razor view to duplicate that look.

I feel like I'm doing it wrong. But I haven't seen any other alternative. I dream of some WPF like design view, but I don't think this exists. Short of that, what do people do to design rich internet apps using MVC and Razor?

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    Most web shops I have worked in doing MVC run visual studio and just make view modifications and refresh the view. With the advent of things like Chrome developer tools we just develop straight on Chrome and not using anything besides VS. Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:33
  • Thanks Paul, that's pretty much what I've been doing too- I use expression web for some things (div placement, css creation and editing) and then chrome dev tools to fine tune the page. Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 0:16

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I would recommend using Visual Studio for a very efficient dev environment. Click here to download VS 2012

It is very efficient because all file types can be accessed and changed from this tool, no dumping of files necessary. This is microsoft's baby, they have put a lot of time and effort into making it the ultimate tool for .NET developers.

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Sorry, I don't get your answer. I AM using VS2012 to write my app. I know I can access all file types, but how do you DESIGN the pages? VS will not render Razor directly. So how do you view the page to design it without displaying the page and then saving the html to edit? Regardless if I use VS or Expression Web at that point the question is the same.
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does the page inspector feature of VS solve some of your problem? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs11trainingcourse_pageinspector.aspx

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This is just like hitting F12 in Chrome or IE... I can enable and disable styles and attributes, but changes are not persisted to the cshtml page... at least its side by side. But it's not an improvement to styling and laying out the page. Dumping to html and using Expression Web still is more effective.

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