ASP.NET MVC

I had no idea that Microsoft was coming out with an MVC (Model View Controller) implementation . I am kind of excited about this one (everyone else was too as everyone came to this session, seriously... everyone was here). I have tried playing with monorail and have not been terribly impressed so hopefully something a bit more integrated and refined would be good. Whether MS pulls it off remains to be seen.

This is one hard to blog about unless you have used an MVC implementation like rails so I will talk about other stuff.

I have liked a lot of the attitudes about this project. Things seem quite pluggable, you can change the view engine, implement your own IOC container, do unit tests with no asp.net runtime required. At the end of the day Scott put it well in that “MS finally is putting out a web framework that focuses on testing”.

There is an alt.net vs. MS undertone here and am wondering if people just came to see Scott vs. Scott. We were discussing at lunch how MS seems to create an implementation of mature open source projects but they are not as good as there open source counterpart.  There is already good unit testing frameworks yet they create msTest which does less than the open source tools do. I am thinking that it might be the same with MVC

It came up that you have to specify the view to render i.e. RenderView(“HelloWorldView”) from the HelloWorldController. In other implementations the view is tied to the controller as they share the same name. Scott brought up the point that MS should not do it this way as every other tool does not so why introduce it (unless there is an advantage to doing it)

All in all the MVC framework looks quite promising and I can not wait to try the beta (in 6-8 weeks it may be coming out). If it works well I hope that it can help drive MVC and better testing/separation of responsibilities out into the community at large.