Inalign's Blog

So far, ASP.NET MVC is working out pretty well. We’ve probably done almost a dozen apps so far. The general hype seems to be true, you’re closer to HTML, and there’s less .NET controls getting in your way. Apps seem to be completed a little faster (although traditional webform apps were pretty fast too).

The biggest plus so far has been in the prototyping stage. Along with the ASP.NET MVC approach are some nice patterns for testing. Something people tend to miss is that you could have done most of this with Webforms, it just wasn’t fashionable then.

Either way, we tend to build out the HTML pages first, and populate them with fake repositories. It is generally easy to prototype with some realistic (but fake) data. We’ve built entire apps that look pretty darn real, and you can get the prototype in front of a customer and have an intelligent conversation.

It was refreshing to get rid of datagrids, repeaters, etc, and just go back to an HTML table. Sometimes it’s all you really need.

I found that some .NET developers really did get to far from the HTML, and were generally out of touch with which .NET control was going to produce which set of HTML tags.

For some efforts, we spent too much time getting a datagrid to work just the right way, or worse yet, one of the .NET tab controls.

ASP.NET MVC is a good start at making the balance between having controls and allowing developers to just write code.

It seems quite odd that we’ve come from classic ASP that had code mixed with HTML, to .NET with no code mixed in, to MVC with some code mixed in. If you do this long enough everything comes full circle.

A major issue I have with ASP.NET MVC is the code mixed in with HTML-the compiler doesn’t catch any errors in that code. You’ll find it at runtime. Something tells me they’re working on that.

MVC frameworks are nothing new, I remember getting into MVC pretty heavily with ColdFusion way back when. The biggest issue back then was lack of documentation. One framework that was quite popular (at the time) had little documentation, but you could go to a one week training course for a few thousand dollars. Not quite what I was looking for.

The great thing about ASP.NET MVC is the documentation-there’s plenty of it. I generally buy three books on a topic and cherry pick the best ideas. For about $100 you’re good to go.