ASP.NET MVC First Impressions

There's been a lot of discussion online lately about Microsoft's new ASP.NET MVC framework. If you don't know what it is, it is a new, alternative framework for web development. It isn't meant to replace ASP.NET web forms, but instead be another choice.

I've been reading about it and playing with the preview releases a bit, so I thought I would write up my brief first impressions. Later on, after I've had a chance to work with it a bit more, and maybe build something useful with it, I'll come back and write something else.

Things I like:

• The separation of logic. I like how it breaks up the presentation (View), logic (Controller) and data (Model) into separate files. It would make it easy to have alternate views of the same data. For example, if you were writing a blog enginge, you could have one view be the normal text view, and another view be the RSS feed.


• URL handling. I wrote recently about URL rewriting using ASP.NET web forms. If we were using ASP.NET MVC, we would have been able to have more friendly URLs with no "tricky" code to intercept the calls and rewrite them to what we already had.


• Cleaner HTML. One of the things I've run into with web forms that has bugged me is the way it renames form elements to things like "ctl00$Leftnavigation1$productSearch". Since you're now responsible for generating form elements yourself, you no longer get this.


• Testing. Since the model and controller logic are separated from the view, you can now write unit tests against them.


• Lots of community support. As I mentioned above, a lot of people are using this and talking about it, so before long, there will be plenty of places to go for answers to questions.

Things I'm not wild about:

• Tag soup. I think there are more ways to do this, but most of the examples I've seen involve putting C# or VB code right in the .aspx file. It's like a return to bad old ASP days.


• Lack of view state. Again, I'm not sure if this is the only way, but so far everything I've seen indicates that you have to manually repopulate form fields, just like in ASP. And this is actually getting better. I noticed in Scott Guthrie's recent post that Preview 5 now automatically repopulates fields in an error condition.


• It is a completely different model from what I (and the other devs on my team) are used to. This is obviously not a huge complaint, since I enjoy learning new things, but if we decide to use this, it will take some time to get everyone up to speed.


• Sparse official documentation. I realize it is still in preview stage, so hopefully this will get better over time.

Overall, this is an interesting framework, and it will be nice to have a choice when developing new projects. Having said that, I don't think we will be rushing to rewrite all our existing code into MVC. We just have far too much time and knowledge invested in what we already have.