Chapter 14. Third-party components
This chapter covers
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 UI 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 (MvcContrib Grid and Microsoft Web Helpers) that offer different styles of integrating with the MVC Framework. These components will be installed into your MVC project using NuGet.
NuGet is installed with MVC, and it makes developing on MVC easier. NuGet is a Visual Studio extension that allows you to easily pull libraries, components, and most importantly their configuration, into your Visual Studio project. These components are called NuGet packages, and they can include .NET assemblies, JavaScript files, HTML and Razor files, CSS files, images, and even files that can add configuration to your project’s web.config.