Recently, I went back to developing websites with ASP.NET MVC (after quite some time in SPA and Web API), and I struggled for some time with some strange Razor views' behaviors I couldn’t understand. Here are some of them. I hope this post will help you save some time in case you have the same problems.

Using Generics in Razor Views

Generics’ syntax has a peculiarity that might interfere when writing inline inside HTML tags: the use of angular brackets. This confuses the Razor interpreter so much that it thinks there is a missing closing tag.

For example, when trying to write @Model.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>(“date”) you’ll get an error and Visual Studio will show some wiggle with the following alert.

Basically, it thinks <DateTime> is an HTML tag and wants you to close it.

The solution is pretty simple: just put everything inside some brackets, like @(Model.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>(“date”))

Order of Execution of Body and Layout Views

I wanted to set the current UI Culture of my pages with every request, so I wrote a partial view that I included at the top of my layout view: all text in the layout was correctly translated, while the text coming from the Body was not.

After some digging, I realized that the order of execution of a Razor view starts with the view itself (which renders the body) and then goes on with the Layout. So, my UICulture was set after the body was rendered. So, I had to move the partial view that was setting the culture at the top of the "main" view.

If you have many views, just put all initialization code inside a view called _ViewStart.cshtml. This way the code is executed before the body is rendered, for every view, and you don’t have to add it to each view manually.

That’s all for now.