Razor: Declarative HTML helpers

The ~/Views/Helpers location as describe in that ScottGu post will not work in MVC 3 RTM. At the time that article was written it was a design idea we were tossing around but ultimately we were not able to implement it.

Putting your helpers in App_Code works but has certain limitations that impact certain MVC scenarios (for example: no access to standard MVC Html. helpers)

Simple workaround:

In each helper add argument WebViewPage page.

App_Code\Test.cshtml:

@using System.Web.Mvc.Html
@using System.Web.Mvc

@helper HelloWorld(WebViewPage page)
{
    @page.Html.Label("HelloWorld")
}

This helper usage in any page:

 @Test.HelloWorld(this)

As marcind said, we weren't able to support the ~/Views/Helpers location due to some limitations in our compilation model.

We're working on a better solution for declarative HTML helpers, but it won't make v1. For v1, we have two solutions:

1. App_Code (which has some problems as Marcin mentioned, but does work)
2. David Ebbo (member of the team) has a Visual Studio add-in that compiles them into your DLL