MVC in .NET

Scott Guthrie posted on his blog last month (October 2007) that his team is working on an MVC architecture for .NET. Since then my nipples have been hard as diamonds.

For those that don’t know the delicious joys of MVC I’ll give a really brief overview: MVC stands for “model-view-controller” which is a way of describing an architectural pattern for building software applications. The basic premise is that software applications built with this pattern are broken into three functional areas that strictly define a separation of concerns between parts of an application. This is similar to a standard 3-tier architecture (presentation layer, business logic, data access layer) except that the presentation layer is broken out in to views, which define only how information is presented to the user, and controllers, which define the interaction between those views and the data that drives the application (models). For more detailed information check out the entry on Wikipedia .

Why This Fills Me With Joy

Back in mid 2006 I heard about this new web development platform from a friend called Ruby on Rails. At that time I had only a passing knowledge of MVC and had never really seen it in practice. I started reading up on MVC and the RoR platform, got some books, downloaded the framework, and fell in love. I could write an entire book on why MVC is a beautiful thing but let’s just say that overall it makes writing, testing and maintaining the kinds of software applications that I build much easier, better and funner.

By November of 2006 I started my own RoR consulting company Square Peg Consulting and started building RoR applications professionally. I have not, however, completely abandoned .NET as there are still many things I love about that platform. Then two things were announced that made me actually excited about .NET again. 1) Microsoft announced that the source code for the .NET framework would be release under the Microsoft For Reference Only license and 2) Scott announced that there will be first class support for MVC built in to ASP.NET.

The ASP.NET implementation of MVC is going to be awesome. There is a video of a presentation Scott Guthrie made at the ALT.NET conf over at Scott Hanselman’s Blog that, while poorly recorded, gives more than enough information to get incredibly excited.

Update

Comments:

Jake said on 11/10/07 01:26 AM

Totally awesome. But you forgot to mention the best part: you can mix and match MVC with the old architecture stuff. It's not all or nothing. w00t.

Tres said on 11/10/07 05:20 AM

True! While RoR is a very pushy platform and makes many assumptions about how people should build applications with it, MVC in .NET is very open ended and provides a basic framework that anyone can use in any way they see fit. You can use any ORM you wish and you can even provide your own controller architecture if you desire. I hope it beta's soon. I want to play with it!!

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