ASP.NET MVC Rocks!

[shayward]

I started playing with ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) framework yesterday. All I can say is YES!

I'm a .NET Developer (C# mostly, some VB) building Windows Forms apps but I've never been happy with web development since ASP.NET and WebForms came out. It was supposed to be the ultimate in easy web development but honestly, I spent more time trying to build clunky work-arounds than actually doing real coding. 3rd party controls break and you just never know what you're going to get.

Well MVC is what ASP.NET should have been.

Drupal lured me away from the Microsoft Web platform. I'm not a big fan of PHP (I peronally like strong-typing and explicit declaration) but I managed to hack together a few Drupal themes, make a few code mods, and use it out of the box.

Of course, I just don't have the time to learn enough PHP to make Drupal "easily" do what I want it to do. I know the .NET Framework extremely well.

DotNetNuke is well done but writing Modules for it require that you depend heavily on the DNN way of doing things.

In one day, I managed to build a complete mock-up (it's not pretty yet) of a database-driven web site and I even used CodeSmith with my own custom templates to generate 100% of the code. SWEET!

Best of all, I've already built custom CodeSmith templates for my Data Classes, Validation, I/O, Security, Transactions, and Connection Management. I could slide ALL of those classes straight into MVC and begin working immediately.

Congratulations, Microsoft. Sometimes it takes you a lot of tries to get it right but when you do it's a thing of absolute beauty. I'm still a Microsoft Fanboy.

- Shaun