MVC.NET

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days you will have noticed that the first CTP of the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions has now shipped. ScottGu has the lowdown as usual.

Given the extensibility of the framework, its not surprise that several interesting modifications/add-ins are cropping up. Hammett has dropped a pile of samples:

MvcExtensions: a class library project with all extensions developed including parameter binder support, Windsor integration and a NVelocity View Engine. I remember complaining about relying exclusively on inheritance to change behavior/add specializations. Looks like I’m not alone on this… To some things, a vertical approach is good enough, but not usually to frameworks. The inheritance scheme eventually will turn into hell in a complex project. I know as I been there.

RestSupport: Uri formats and a nice Respond To syntax inspired on the work from Chris Ortman/MonoRail.RestSupport.

UsingAR: self explanatory

UsingNVelocity: ditto.

Take a look at his blog post for more details and to download the samples here.

However the most traction award has to go to the open source MvcContrib project on Codeplex which will serve as a repository for all things MVC. MvcContrib has already taken contributions in the form of controller factories for the main container frameworks out there: Windsor, Spring.net and StructureMap.net and a Monorail style binder to aid conversion of a NameValueCollection (i.e. form or querystring) to an object graph.

I’ve been toying with MVC for a few hours in between real work and the one benefit which initially strikes me is nicer VS.net integration using the webform view engine. Full intellisense and type safety in the views is something sorely missing from Monorail (given that I use the NVelocity view engine there, not sure about the other view engines and what they provide).

A side-effect of using the MVC framework is that I’m finally getting to use all the cool 3.5 language features too.

The Day of Reckoning?

… OK perhaps not. Anyway, today is the supposed release date of the first CTP of the new Microsoft System.Web.MVC framework. As you’ve no doubt seen in previous posts this is a pretty big deal to me.

I’m putting the final touches on a fairly big project right now and have a smaller (internal) one lined up which would be a perfect candidate for testing out System.Web.MVC. Lets see how it stacks up against Monorail…

Microsoft MVC next week?

Some news if you haven’t read it elsewhere: the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions CTP is due for release at some point next week. My primary interest being MVC by far, then Astoria I guess.

I can’t wait to start fiddling with the MVC framework. Good work Microsoft!

Check out ScottGu’s post here for more information.

Rolling with the 2008’s

I’ve finally got round to installing the RTM edition of VS2008. Apart from taking the best part of 5 hours, including removing the beta version I had installed (and had been using for the last few months solid), everything has gone pretty much without incident.

I say “pretty much without incident” as I did have one pant-wetting moment when the installer rolled back due to some nondescript assembly failing to install correctly. However, the time honoured fix: i.e. reboot seemed to have done the trick.

The project I’m working on at the mo has already been upgraded to the new VS2008 format way-back when I had installed the beta so no troubles there either.

ReSharper and VisualSVN are all fine and dandy. My settings have also crossed the chasm, so all-in-all not a bad install experience pour moi.

Speaking of ReSharper, we need a new edition taking care of the 3.5 language features post haste!