ASP.NET MVC goes Beta

I just saw that ASP.NET MVC went beta based on a tweet from Kevin Dente. Time to do some upgrades and see what is new and changed in this release.

Who and What is ASP.NET MVC for?

Michael Neel wrote today about what a good definition is for ASP.NET MVC.

I have to admit that many of my descriptions of ASP.NET MVC have been tied to deficiencies and frustrations in the current ASP.NET Webforms implementation. It is time to start talking less about what it isn’t and to start talking more about what it is.

Michael also points out that it is not likely people will use ASP.NET MVC just so they can use the MVC pattern, since you could come pretty close to MVC with some extra work in ASP.NET Webforms.

The main point of the post was to figure out a good definition of ASP.NET MVC that doesn’t rely on problems in Webforms. And here is where I don’t think he captured what ASP.NET MVC is about. Michael ends up with this definition

“ASP.NET MVC is the evolution of Classic ASP, adding an easier separation of concerns while not using an event based model like WebForms.”

First off, I used Classic ASP successfully for several years, but I don’t think there is enough in common to invoke Classic ASP in this definition. What we typed in .asp pages looked like what you make with .aspx pages in the default view engine, but beyond that I can’t find much similarity.

Second, he ends up counter balancing ASP.NET MVC against the event model. I’m thrilled that most of the event model has gone away with MVC, but isn’t this part of the definition implying that there is a problem with the event model in ASP.NET Webforms? So I think to define what value a company would get from ASP.NET MVC you need to counter balance it against the current Webforms implementation (to a degree). But it definitely needs stand more on it’s own as it grows up.

Anyway, Michael’s post has has really got me thinking. In an interview this week I was explaining to an architect why one would want to use ASP.NET MVC and I think I was able to articulate pretty well why you would want to use it and who would not benefit so much from it. I don’t have a better succinct definition yet.

So what benefits does ASP.NET MVC have for me?

It encourages me to separate out fundamental concerns. I want my tools to encourage me along a successful path. They can’t make me build good applications, but they can give me a good model. Having a View that is just about transforming data into a page (or some other format) is good. There isn’t much temptation to put business, data or flow logic in the view. The Controller accepts requests in a predictable format, finds out what Model it needs to call and says what view to render if necessary. The Model can easily be decoupled from the first two parts.

Routing is a first class concept now giving me a prescriptive way to specify a request format. It’s not an after thought like url rewriting.

ASP.NET MVC certainly flattens out the complex Webforms event model. Any time I can cut unneeded complexity from an application I will. I can’t imagine Webforms without preinit, init, render, etc.

As I do more and more TDD with web development, I know that ASP.NET MVC is easier to unit test.

Last of all, it takes me closer to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Some people want to pretend these languages don’t exist and want to do Winforms on the Web and others just don’t want to have to deal with the quirks of those languages. I make no claim that they are perfect, but they are good enough and by this point in web history there is agreement on their implementations.

Can we quite having to write ASP.NET MVC? It would be good to have a shorter name for writing. And yes, I ended my title in a preposition, get over it.

Twin Cities Code Camp MVC Session

Thanks to everyone who attended my ASP.Net MVC session. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you get the opportunity to try out what the MVC framework has to offer. The slides have a lot more information than what I was able to get through in my talk. The project is still very young, but has so much potential.

Please leave comments here and let me know what you thought of the session. I’m trying to constantly improve it to make it the right fit.

More ASP.Net MVC Slides.

Twin Cities Code Camp IV

Yesterday, I was in the Cities at the fourth Twin Cities Code Camp.  It really was a fantastic experience, likely the the best one yet (I presented at the first two code camps as well). From the presentations I attended I would say that the quality of the presentations was very high. They easily would rival what you get at a paid conference. I also met a bunch of people I had never seen in person which is really cool.

Some of the Iowa crowd that went up was Javier Lozano, Bryan Sampica and Greg Wilson. There were several other attendees from Bryan’s company as well. The Iowa presenters and attendees have grown significantly since the first one where I was the sole Iowan as far as I know.

Some interesting people I met/saw were D’Arcy Lussier, Neil Iverson (Inetium), Brandy Favilla (New Horizons), Robert Boedigheimer, Chris Williams (Magenic), Aaron Erickson (Magenic), Kent Tegels (DevelopMentor), Jeff Ferguson, Chris Johnson, Saviz Artang, John Thurow, Kirstin (Magenic), Nicole and Kristen (New Horizons) and Justin Chase.

My favorite session was Neil Iverson’s PowerShell for Developers.  It was a fast paced live demo that kept incrementally building.  Rarely have I been so engaged in a session. D’Arcy’s MVC vs ASP.Net talk was also really interesting.  We only had about 6 people in the session, so we went around the room and said where we were coming from in our ASP.Net development experience. Then D’Arcy showed us how he typically structures his webforms applications, and we peppered him with questions.  I learned a lot from the session.

My talk was the second of the day in the large seminar room so we actually had about 50 people in the session.  One thing that was cool was that D’Arcy Lussier did an intro talk right before mine, so I got to build off of what he did in the session before. Mine seemed to go pretty well. There were a lot of questions and interest in what MVC brings to web development in the Microsoft space.

Jason Bock did a great job again bringing this all together.  It’s a lot of work coordinating an event like this.

If you liked what you got at the Twin Cities Code Camp you’ll definitely want to check out the Iowa Code Camp.  We’ll be a little bit smaller, but have some top notch presenters, a great facility and will have great prizes as well.  The registration is right on the home page and is as simple as it gets.

TechEd 2008 – Developers

This year for the first time TechEd is spanning two weeks. The first week is for developers and the second week is for the “other” people – the IT Pro crowd :)

I’ll be working at TechEd as a Technical Learning Guide(TLG) in the Hands on Labs area and may do an Instructor Led Lab. It’ll take 32 hours of the week, but I’m hoping to catch some of the other sessions as well.

The word on the street is that all of the TLG’s will be wearing sexy black shirts, so it should be pretty easy to find us. 

The conference is in Orlando the first week of June. It might be worth checking it out if you have a week to spare and want to get some insight on the latest technologies from Microsoft.