

This article presents an overview of one of these tools, Bootstrap, which is included in many of the Visual Studio 2013 Web Application templates. Still, thought must be given to determine if one is right for your site.

Though these tools aren’t a panacea for mobile Web developers, they can significantly ease the development process. Today, however, there are UI frameworks that allow a site’s Web pages to support mobile, tablet, desktop and even large-screen desktops-all with a single code base. In the past, a Web site that supported mobile and desktop required different code bases.

What if that user could instead encounter a UX designed specifically for a mobile form factor, and enjoy easily interacting with your site? Will the user see a rendering of your site that’s impossible to use on a phone because the site was designed for desktop only? If so, that user will most likely move on to a more mobile-friendly site. It’s only a matter of time before a customer taps your site’s URL on their mobile device. The preview of Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download.Volume 30 Number 6 Web Development - Building Responsive Web Sites with Bootstrap This isn’t directly integrated into Visual Studio, but it obviously just takes replacing a CSS file to change a Bootstrap theme.ĭevelopers could, of course, always use a Bootstrap competitor like ZURB’s Foundation for their apps, too, but the default for ASP.NET web apps is not Bootstrap. In his demo at Build, for example, Microsoft’ Scott Hanselman also showed how developers can use Bootswatch to find Bootstrap themes to make their sites stand out a bit more. It is the most popular framework for building responsive sites and has the most active ecosystem of services around it.

If you were already tired of seeing too many Bootstrap-based sites, chances are you will now encounter even more of them.įor Microsoft, it makes sense to add Bootstrap to its developer tools for web apps. Visual Studio 2013’s project templates will use Bootstrap by default when you want to build a web app in Microsoft’s ASP.NET now. At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that it has added support for Bootstrap, the popular framework for responsive websites that was launched out of Twitter in 2011.
