Comments on: Phil Haack posts about ASP.NET MVC

By: Joe Ocampo

Joe Ocampo — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:36:27 +0000

@Mike just because we have been doing it doesn’t mean we have to continue.

I hate to use this but we are like a bunch of lemming s sometime and we just fall in with the standard conventions.

MR and RoR have been very successful with the Convention over Configuration approach. And I think for us to turn a blind eye towards this approach simply because MS want to change it is a diservice to the community.

A majority of the MVC framework takes a convention over configuration approach. This slight decoration causes a shift in that way of thinking. It is not about a matter of style as it is a matter of adhering to framework principle no matter how esoteric they may be to new comers.

The fact of the matter is all we are asking for is a choice and I believe Phil and the rest of the MVC team has given us this with the “ConventionController” so now it truly is a matter of style.

Although I do like Scott’s suggestion about the controller defaulting to this behavior and forcing the “SafeMode” when needed. Similar to VB’s option explicit.

By: Sean Chambers

Sean Chambers — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:25:01 +0000

@Mike

So lets say you type out “[ControllerAction]” for each public action that you have. On a medium size project I recently built I had about 10 actions per controller and about 40 controllers across the whole project.

18 Characters x 10 actions per controller = 180 characters PER controller.

Across all controllers that is 7200 characters.

Show me someone that doesn’t think thats alot of extra typing and I’ll show you a fool.

Tell you what, you add all the ControllerAction attributes to all your public methods which will take you about 8+ hours and I will subclass it like Phil demonstrated and be done in 5 minutes.

I make a living at programming it as well but if you don’t try to be more effecient then I can’t take you seriously. sorry.

By: efdee

efdee — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:10:49 +0000

@Mike: It’s about as great as “I’ve been making a living of it for 2 years now”. People make a living off selling crack on the street, what’s your point ?

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:58:07 +0000

“It adds a lot of extra typing”
Wow, great argument. Same goes for it being a Microsoft technology, the whole (ASP).NET framework is, yet I’ve been making a living programming it for 2 years now. So where’s the problem?

By: ScottGu

ScottGu — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:02:59 +0000

This blog post covers how to pass ViewData from a Controller to a View pretty comprehensively: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/06/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-3-passing-viewdata-from-controllers-to-views.aspx

There are two ways to-do it:

1) Via a late-bound ViewData dictionary (like Phil showed above)

2) Via a strongly typed object. The benefit of this option is that you get type checking and intellisense within your view.

I cover both in my blog post.

Thanks,

Scott

By: Haacked

Haacked — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 23:42:56 +0000

There is a propertybag approach. You can do this:

ViewData["foo"] = new Bar();

And reference it in the View as < %= ViewData["foo"] %>

So you don’t have to pass in the object to renderview. However, if you do, you can take advantage of strongly typed access to your data.

By: Joe Ocampo

Joe Ocampo — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:12:48 +0000

I agree with you on the usage of the [ControllerAction] attribute. This was something that I always loved about MR in that they took a convention over configuration approach. The less noise I have in my code the better.

I don’t know how open MS is going to be with the ASPMVC framework but Jeffery Pallermo recently blogged about an OSS contrib project for ASPMVC. It looks like they are going to use this project to extend the capabilities of the ASPMVC. This may help solve your issue.

http://www.codeplex.com/MVCContrib