from Hacker News

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Released

by yaakov on 3/19/09, 10:19 AM with 23 comments

  • by CarlHoerberg on 3/19/09, 2:12 PM

    This a great framework, i've been using it for over a year now. It's been iteratively released (to public) 10 times, which is a new way for MS to develop, and they have really listened to the feedback from its users.

    Visual Studio + asp.net mvc is a highly efficient dev. enviroment.

  • by misterbwong on 3/19/09, 6:53 PM

    I've worked almost exclusively as a webforms programmer for the last few years and transitioning to this over the last month has been surprisingly challenging for me. I'm definitely a newbie to the "real" web and I never knew how much of the web webforms actually hid from me.

    Despite the difficulties, I've been encouraged by the flexibility of MVC and am thinking about making it my framework of choice for my coming projects.

    IMO, the best bits of MVC are:

    -Separation of concerns. No more mixing business logic with the presentation ("view") layer. I can swap out layers of my architecture more easily

    -More control over page elements. I always found the ASP.NET controls a bit lacking...

    -Leaner apps. I understand that this is mostly the developer's fault as there's always a way to do things better, but most of the apps I've seen written in webforms just feel bloated. There's too much cruft built into and around webforms to make it seem desktop-y

    -Better support for TDD. I've not used this part of it yet, but the MVC model does lend itself to TDD much better than webforms.

    I'm not saying that WebForms will be completely gone from my development cycle, though. It is still good for many things. I think the most glaring benefits are:

    -Rapid development for internal/quickie apps. This may just be my experience and familiarity talking but it's very easy to throw up a quick and dirty app with webforms. Great for internal projects.

    -Legacy applications. This benefit will fade over time, but I was hearing that there were problems with MVC on II6. Also, I don't believe it's supported on any version below II6.

  • by rlm on 3/19/09, 1:19 PM

    Amazing how timing changes the amount of points given to the exact same story :D

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=523053

  • by wayne on 3/19/09, 4:00 PM

    Awesome framework. All the quirkiness of ASP.NET is abstracted away from you (though you can still get to it if you need to). As a Rails developer you'll feel right at home with controllers, views, routing, and tests.

    The annoyances:

    - ActiveRecord has its downsides but it's easy to use and ASP.NET MVC doesn't come with a similar ORM. LINQ is awkward to learn.

    - It doesn't have view partials.

  • by jpcx01 on 3/20/09, 1:59 AM

    Big win for Microsoft. Though I'm skeptical about whether the VB focused ASP.net dev community will adopt this over the fundamentally broken "WebForm" piece (Microsoft hasn't taken any official position over which one is prefered).

    Still, I've gone through this and its very well architected. Not going to get me to switch back to ASP.NET from Rails/Merb, but its nice to know that some people at Microsoft finally understand how to build a well built web development framework.

  • by cdeutmey on 3/19/09, 7:15 PM

    I'm having a hard time getting excited about this. In 3 months MS will release version 1.1 and then version 2 coming 6 months after, each with version compatibility issues with the release before. Then a new flavor of the month will catch MS's attention and this will finally stabilize to the point where it can be implemented or identified as junk technology.
  • by c0un7d0wn on 3/19/09, 7:56 PM

    What are the advantages of this over Castle Monorail?