As a hybrid developer, myself (having done a lot of work in both back-end and front-end roles, often together), I have a long-standing dislike of the ASP.NET WebForms model as well... while its initial design impetus was to provide easy, drag-and-drop design tools to democratize web development (the same way that Visual Basic made app-programming accessible to the non-CS-major), the methods it used to try to force state on a stateless environment (the web) are ham-handed and forced (oh ViewState, how I loathe thee!).

They also violate some of the central principles of markup development and styling, just by the very fact that, by default, ASP.NET takes over the ID attribute, forcing CSS designers to use classes the same way that IDs were meant to be used, layering elements in deep stacks of divs and nested tags that can make styling the controls a nightmare in all but the most simplistic systems.

Given these things, your path is not an easy one, as I assume a rewrite for MVC would be cost-or-time-prohibitive.

Is there any way to provide the designer an environment in which to run the web application, so they can see their CSS changes in real-time? When I'm doing design work in ASP.NET WebForms, I find it invaluable to be able to fire up the web app on my own machine, make tweaks to the CSS, and run it locally to see how that affects the app.

Yes, this means that the designer will have to learn how to press F5 to run the app. (Or just give them access to FTP to the directories where the CSS, JS and images are, even, on a test environment!) It also means that they'll see a lot of back-end code, though if you tell them to just ignore your .cs or .vb files, that will go a long way to keeping them from panicking... and of course, that means that you have to be sure you're not doing things like setting styles from your codebehind files... (but you wouldn't do that, would you, as that ties data and view too closely, right?).

If your site is structured well, with distinct CSS and JS files, and not a lot of inline styling forced on the markup, it's possible they can get most of their job done by just having them avoid the <% %> areas. On the other hand, it might also give the designer a little more appreciation for what you have to go through, when trying to translate their static HTML/CSS into something that works for a dynamic app.

As a hybrid developer, myself (having done a lot of work in both back-end and front-end roles, often together), I have a long-standing dislike of the ASP.NET WebForms model as well... while its initial design impetus was to provide easy, drag-and-drop design tools to democratize web development (the same way that Visual Basic made app-programming accessible to the non-CS-major), the methods it used to try to force state on a stateless environment (the web) are ham-handed and forced (oh ViewState, how I loathe thee!).

They also violate some of the central principles of markup development and styling, just by the very fact that, by default, ASP.NET takes over the ID attribute, forcing CSS designers to use classes the same way that IDs were meant to be used, layering elements in deep stacks of divs and nested tags that can make styling the controls a nightmare in all but the most simplistic systems.

Given these things, your path is not an easy one, as I assume a rewrite for MVC would be cost-or-time-prohibitive.

Is there any way to provide the designer an environment in which to run the web application, so they can see their CSS changes in real-time? When I'm doing design work in ASP.NET WebForms, I find it invaluable to be able to fire up the web app on my own machine, make tweaks to the CSS, and run it locally to see how that affects the app.

One option might be to set up a virtual machine tailored specifically to ASP.NET development that the designer can run from their workstation, so they don't have to mix their two toolsets, and if they happen to screw something up in the dev-space, it can always be reloaded from a functioning image.

Yes, this means that the designer will have to learn how to press F5 to run the app. (Or just give them access to FTP to the directories where the CSS, JS and images are, even, on a test environment!) It also means that they'll see a lot of back-end code, though if you tell them to just ignore your .cs or .vb files, that will go a long way to keeping them from panicking... Of course, that means that you have to be sure you're not doing things like setting styles from your codebehind files... (but you wouldn't do that, would you, as that ties data and view too closely, right?).

If your site is structured well, with distinct CSS and JS files, and not a lot of inline styling forced on the markup, it's possible they can get most of their job done by just having them avoid the <% %> areas. On the other hand, it might also give the designer a little more appreciation for what you have to go through, when trying to translate their static HTML/CSS into something that works for a dynamic app.