I found Pinegrow while looking for a visual editor for CSS. I downloaded it and ran through part of the video tutorials and was ready to purchase it when I thought I’d better check on “ASP.net” support.
I emailed Pinegrow and they were very fast about replying back and telling me at this point there wasn’t any ASP\ASPX plugin, nor do they plan on any ASP\ASPX plugin support in the near future. Needless to say this hit me pretty hard since I was enjoying learning about CSS and how it works on the back end, thanks to Pinegrow.
So I thought that before I totally give up on it, I’d reach out to the community to see if anyone has successfully been able to get ASP.net incorporated with the code Pinegrow generates? I’m using Visual Studio 17 and as it stands, the webapp I wrote for the company I work for has been working very well for nearly 3 years, I want to start replacing all my tables with CSS Grid\Flexbox support.
All help will be greatly appreciated and I don’t want to give up on Pinegrow since it’s helped me understand a little better on how CSS works.
Thank you for your time! Let me know if you have questions about what I am doing or trying to accomplish.
Hi John,
I’m a asp.net developer and i use pinegrow as my main tool.
When you say you use .aspx i figure you are using the old webforms and that is horrible to work with due to huge limitations. I also came from winforms and thought the best way was to go to webforms but i stumbled upon a lot of problems with customizing webforms to my needs.
So i forced myself to go the MVC way of doing stuff and now asp.net core.
However if you just want to replace your webform tables with bootstrap tables to update your existing webforms app it should not be a problem. I did the same way back with one of my webforms apps. However there is no easy way to do this due to webforms and that’s why they invented MVC where you have much more control over the content instead off all being baked in the the webforms controls.
Pinegrow is not optimal when it comes to asp.net but its the best option you got really.
Unless you use frameworks such as telerik and syncfusion with pre styled controls.
This is the problem with a existing app.
If you have a existing app and want to redesign it then you have a problem because you cant do that in a easy way in pinegrow. If the app is in webforms then the problem is huge because you do not have control over the forms and too much magic happening in the backend.
If the app is MVC then you can do a bit with pinegrow such as use the URL option from pinegrow and do some small styling things from opening the page or you can try to copy paste all the html code and remove the razor and asp.net tags and make a new html project in pinegrow and do you styling and copy past it back in visual studio and add all the razor and asp.net tags back again not optimal and its time consuming.
However if you are making a app from scratch and not modifying a existing app then pinegrow is awesome.
My workflow with pinegrow is like this and it works very well on new apps.
I make a new pure html app in pinegrow.
When deisgn is ready i move it to visual studio and add the tags and backend c# code.
If i need to redesign something along the road i do it in the pure html project in pinegrow and i just copy past the html code from pinegrow to visual studio under the existing code and i copy past the asp.net tags etc.
So in short if you need to redesign existing apps then pinegrow is not optimal , but for everything else its the best there is and pinegrow is one of my favoriet tools and the best investment i have done the last 10 years. I have saved so much time using it and that is priceless.
Thank you for the very detailed and well worded email. You brought up very, very good excellent points and gave me food for thought.
A little background on me and why I’m doing what I’m doing.
I’m a DBA (keep that in mind) that got an idea in his head to help myself out with my day-to-day activities by writing something to help ME keep track of things.
It started out as an Excel spreadsheet with VBA scripting --> moved to a visual basic windows app --> then moved to a visual basic web app then rested on a C#\asp(dot)net web app. That’s where I’m at now. This happened over the course of about 5 years. Remember…I’m a DBA that knew enough about programming to be dangerous and wasn’t afraid to ask questions and Google something! LOL
MVC is on the drawing board. But unfortunately that is a whole new architecture that I’d have to teach myself on top of all my other DBA duties.
My webapp has been working very well since early 2016. I’ve made minor modifications to it, error fixing and what not but I wanted to expand on it (again) and get rid of tables in lieu of divs then someone told me about CSS Grids\Flex boxes. And that peeked my interest. And this is what led me to Pinegrow.
I want to move forward with what I can by including some CSS grids and take a step back and see what I need from my company to move into the MVC architecture. Being a part-time developer learning this stuff on my own and still do my DBA job is not all that easy. LOL
I’ll absorb what you took the time to type out & see what I can do with it. Thanks again! And I’m not above asking for guidance, suggestions and helpful comments.
Hi there,
I really feel you when it comes to learning MVC its a very long and bumpy road and my head is spinning with all the new stuff and the new things i had/have to learn. It’s so much more work also to have to make your own controls instead of drag and drop them and as a freelance developer i wish i could use webforms more.
What you can do is make the things you need in pinegrow or you can actual download a lot of pre created bootstrap snippets etc and just customize them to you needs in pinegrow.
You can add it to your webform app but not in a easy copy paste way.
But you should be able to google your way to how to style the different asp.net webforms with bootstrap.