Especially in today fast moving environment there is a commercial pressure to rapidly deliver products in short development life cycles . Nothing new here, this is Agile methodology we all know.
An important stage is collecting requierements and build some mockups/wireframes, at least as a starting point for discussions with stakeholders.
Many unexpensive tools exist but usually (among other downsides) they don't have a forward engineering facility. As a result, design complex interfaces (with hundreds of controls) implies redundant work: firstly design mockups and redoing all the work in your preffered IDE.
As a shortcut, some people prefer to directly build the GUI using drag & drop facility and some RAD tools (WinForms/WebForms etc.)
However, as soon as your product matures (and the audience grows), you may want to migrate to something more manageable and easily scalable (maybe with mobile support), i.e. ASP MVC. But you already have pretty complex web pages, with lots of controls - and business value embedded -, and rewrite all of these is not recommended, let alone possible for some advanced, complex controls (grids with template cells etc. )
There are two (pretty different) questions here:
- Once you have a pretty stable product, how do you manage to make such transitions painlessly - i.e. incrementally replace/rewrite modules, part by part (when possible), (WebForms-> MVC), or what? This is the main question - what strategy proved most successful for you?
- What tools do you use for rapidly prototype ASP MVC applications (from scratch)?
As other people observed, there is a lack of complete/mature products for rapidly prototyping directly for ASP MVC projects.
Some tools could be found here - most people already know them, most probably...
- https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-tools-for-rapidly-prototyping-a-web-application
- http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/08/30-essential-ux-tools/
- http://keynotopia.com/keynote-mockups-templates/
- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-UI-framework-that-work-with-AngularJS-to-build-mobile-apps
- http://alternativeto.net/software/balsamiq-mockups/
- https://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/asp.net/rapid-prototyping,-the-mvc-working-model/
This is a pretty classic problem, with not a simple/single answer, I realize that. It's just I don't have an extensive and recent experience with such tools, especially for modern/mobile apps.
You should look at each part of M.V.C. separately, and choose the best tool that you find comfortable with for that respective part. The RAD tools came from the time of Visual Basic and Borland Delphi and the address mainly the view, i.e. user interface structure and its behavior. The model and controller part are mainly concepts of how to separate your application logic. Current web apps have the UI mainly in JavaScript and it gets as complex as of the classical RAD platforms got it. So, you should concentrate of starting from a good JavaScript framework with a consistent widget set. Here is a tool you can evaluate several of them with: https://sourceforge.net/projects/jul-designer/ For the present days, the cost of expressing your positive creativity should be zero.