ASP.NET to get MVC? 3
Martin Fowler posted an interesting summary of the alt.net conference, in which he mentions that the ASP.NET framework is getting an MVC makeover.
At our Rails classes, we introduce the MVC concept right away, because it's the central nervous system of the Rails framework. Fortunately for me, when I started learning Rails, it wasn't the first time I had encountered an MVC frameworkd. I think I first learned about MVC back when Microsoft used a slighly absurd form of it they called the "Document-View Architecture" back when I was writing Windows applicationsin C++ with MFC. I was perplexed when I switched from C++ to C#, and found that Microsoft had neither provided (nor even recommended) any particular architectural pattern for either Winforms or Webforms apps.
It looks like they've decided that was a bad idea, and are now finding ways to glue MVC back onto ASP.NET (which I applaud).
Jeff, I'm not sure MS thinks webforms were a bad idea. MVC is an additional model, not a replacement. Both will be equally supported.
There's some benefits/issues too. First, no view state. Second, no postback. Third, webcontrols are going to be render only. All good things but will require some changes in existing webforms. MVC also works with any of the dependency-injection frameworks out there and he demo'd it with nUnit. Plus any of the new dynamic languages will work with it--Hanselman showed IronPython and IronRuby will be supported too.
The really interesting thing was that ScottGu specifically mentioned that it was influenced by Django and the routing was much like Merb.
One thing that ticks me with Asp .net is how it makes the average programmer completely oblivious to how a web page actually works, it trys to solve web application in similar vein to win forms. I would love to see this new framework get back to more the roots of http. The news of better TDD integration for web pages is great new as well.
Makes me glad that MonoRail is around.