I’m Down With M.V.C., Yeah You Know Me!

Over the past week, I’ve had some time to dig into the new ASP.NET MVC framework. For starters, my background in web development is mostly classic ASP talking to COM objects built in C++. I’ve only used ASP.NET to provide web services for smart clients. Beyond that, my experience has been all PHP joined by a short experimentation period with Ruby on Rails. When Scott Gu presented the new ASP.NET MVC framework at the first ALT.NET Austin in 2007, I was excited to see Microsoft stepping into the space where at the time Monorail was the only viable choice.

First things first — the benefit of waiting until now to jump into ASP.NET MVC is being able to learn from the writing that has been produced. Jimmy Bogard has written a number of articles about how they are using the MVC framework, including strong opinions about how to adhere to the SOLID principles and ensure the long-term maintainability of the final application. Jeremy Miller and Chad Myers have certainly voiced their opinions about the framework, resulting in their own FubuMVC framework.

From my initial dive into the framework, it seems as if an emphasis was put on the View and Controller while leaving the Model a bit behind. Views and controllers are certainly easier to demonstrate, but a good model is going to be very domain specific and hard to generalize in a demo. The framework does make it easy to keep the domain and application services separate from both the controllers and the views, so I think the underpinnings for success are certainly present.

At this point, I’ve only been working with ASP.NET MVC for about a week and I am enthusiastic about what is being provided by Microsoft. Considering Microsoft’s efforts to work with the development community during the development of the framework combined with developer interest, I think it is a sensible solution and certainly a better alternative to ASP.NET WebForms in a .NET development shop. Plus, I feel that web developers should know both HTML and JavaScript, they are the languages of the web after all.