My approach to MVC...

Over the holiday, in addition to several other tasks, I decided to develop my approach to the upcoming release of Microsoft's MVC framework. From what I've learned so far, MVC is definitely the way to go. After studying MVC, web forms looks like a kludgy mess. MVC is clean and cool.

Anyway, my problem is that I have several sites that could use some revamping. I want to use MVC but what do you do? Microsoft's frame work isn't available. Monorail is out and stable but will it be used going forward? I studied several approaches, including writing web forms in a more MVC like manner.

I've decided to use monorail for my upcoming projects. I am certain that there will be a simple upgrade path to Microsoft's MVC if necessary. Monorail gets me on the way with my upcoming projects.

What to do?

As I've mentioned, I've been studying monorail and the whole MVC architecture. I am excited about it. Can't wait to get started with it, however, I was a little disappointed to see this post from the leader of monorail indicating their wait and see attitude towards Microsoft's MVC framework. I'm ready to go, ready to get started. MVC seems to solve a lot of problems that have held me up for years. But, what do you do? Investing a lot of time in learning and implementing monorail seems like it may lead to a dead-end. I began learning the brail view engine, but Hammett indicates that it doesn't work with MVC. Will it by the time its released? Does anyone else have an opinion on what we can do now?

My head hurts....

This weekend, I've been catching up on the revolution. I am absolutely amazed at the amount of stuff that is out there that I was totally oblivious to before.

Just to get an idea, check out The Castle Project. When I began reading about what all was out there, I was like a kid in a toy store, but after a while, the reality hit me of how much I need to catch up on.

I spent most of the weekend learning about monorail. But when you begin studying monorail, you need to learn about view engines. I began with nVelocity but quickly changed to using Brail.
This lead to reading about the Boo language, helpers, javascript libraries and more. The cool thing about this whole architecture is that you can change view engines without modifying your business logic at all. With webforms, your view (the html and controls) is tied directly to your logic (the code behind). With monorail, the logic does its thing and them puts any data that the view needs in the Property Bag. The view can then do with it what it wishes. Clean separation of concerns.

I've also done some reading about jQuery which is a cool javascript library that allows you to separate your javascript code from your html cleanly. Wow, a lot to catch up on. The net result, however, is a pretty good idea of how to put an application together using the MVC architecture rather than the standard Webforms methodology. This post by Andrew Peters provides a good discussion of one model over the other.

I gotta run, got more reading to do...

Sit back and wait for the revolution....

This business is amazing. There have several times that I've worked in one place for a long time using a particular technology. When that contract or job ended, I wondered if my skills have become too outdated to get a new job.

The cool thing about this business is....there's a revolution every few years that puts everyone in the same boat. Regardless of how much you know about a particular system or technology, it will be replaced by something better in very short order.

The reason that I mention this is, the ASP.NET world is in the middle of a revolution now. I feel that I'm late to the party, but I am trying to catch up with it now. To get an idea of what's going on, check out ScottGu's blog about the new MVC framework for ASP.NET. It's changing the whole model for web application development. No postbacks? No Viewstate?

Other suggested reading/viewing: Subsonic a powerful OR/M for .NET technology. You should also check out the soniccasts. He gives some great information about Subsonic, but also about Ruby on Rails which is an MVC framework for web apps that is the inspiration for this movement.

In addition, check out The Castle Project which is a collection of related projects that includes Monorail which is an MVC framework for .NET that has been around for a while.

Much thanks to Tim Knight, one of the most gifted developers I've had the pleasure of working with, who opened my eyes to the revolution.