Sharing Asp.net Applications With Designers

[Darrel]

Our company recently decided to go with SourceGear as a sourcecontrol tool. It does seem like a really great product.

I have one question though.

What is the best way to share an asp.net application with web designers?The problem is those dlls. Unless the designers have Visual Studio as well they can't just run the web app. Thye could check in and checkout files but they wouldn't be able to see how there changes looks. I have thought of three ways this can be handled:
1) When we check in new changes we manually through SourceGear drop in a dll, for the designers to rtetreive. (not very feasible)
2) Include a batch file which will compile it that the designers would need to run ( a bit more feasible, but more coding work, and all existing apps would need to be modifed to get the comile to work.)
3) Have the designers work from a branch of the apllication from within SourceGear, and on occasion we merge changes together. At the times of merge we can drop a compiled dll into the designers branch. ( This seems like the best so far. We would be working on different parts files, so the merges shouldn't be that difficult. )

Does anyone have any other suggestions, or information on how they got around the problem?

[ZackJones]

Here everyone uses Visual Studio so things are easy for us. Here's some ideas that may work:

1 - Get everyone to use Visual Studio. Designers don't need as many features as developers so you may be able to get scalled back versions.

2 - What about the webmatrix application? I've never used it but I think it's a free scaled down version of Visual Studio.

3 - Share the intepub folder on the development computer. This would be a pain but you could do something like this:

Designer A works with Developer A. When Designer A needs a file Developer A checks it out. Designer A does modifications and informs Developer A when done so Developer A can check back in.