Chapter 5. Consuming third-party components
This chapter covers
- Learning the basic MvcContrib Grid
- Advanced MvcContrib Grid techniques
- Uploading files with SlickUpload
The ASP.NET MVC Framework provides a lot of control over rendering HTML out of the box, but that comes at a cost. The HTML helpers are basic and provide simple user interface elements, leaving it up to you to handcraft nice UIs using HTML and CSS. Although that’s a great option for an experienced web designer, most developers find relying on a third-party component to be much more productive. Doing so allows you to develop your application rather than spend lots of time on UI infrastructure.
This chapter will demonstrate two third-party components that offer different styles of integrating with the MVC Framework. The first is the Grid component, available from the open source MvcContrib project, which can be used to render an HTML table. The second is the SlickUpload component for uploading large or multiple files.
First let’s look at the MvcContrib Grid.