- James (@godaddy on Twitter) 

Most of these things were handled in rather long methods in the base Controller class.  If you wanted to tweak one line of code, you necessarily had to override a 300-line method which constituted 50% of the functionality of MVC’s model binding (or something like that).

By the time we had changed just those three things (something we used to refer to as Opinionated MVC — google for some videos of talks we gave), we had replaced more than 75% of ASP.NET MVC (by one reckoning).

I hope things have gotten better in MVC3 and now MVC4, but I imagine the fundamental problems are still there and it is still difficult to override something small without necessarily having to override something big.

After reading your post I do now realize that the base Controller class in asp.net mvc is a violation of SRP, but I’m not sure I understand why that matters.  It seems like just a convenient, simple base class that MS is giving me that supports most if not all of the things I would need my controller to do—render a view, render a parital view, render an action, etc etc.

I can understand why *I* shouldn’t write a huge class that does multiple things, since that’ll make maintenance harder down the road.  But what specific maintenance problems can I honestly expect from this base controller class that MS wrote?  Or is this just ideological purity?