WHITE PAPERS SPONSORED PROFILES JOB BOARD WEBINAR CENTER FREE SOFTWARE BZ RESEARCH ALMSHAREPOINT EVENTS CALENDAR PRINT/PDF EDITION PRINT/PDF BACK ISSUES

SUBSCRIBE TODAY CUSTOMER SERVICE EDITORIAL BEATS GUEST VIEW GUIDE SD TIMES 100 GUIDE EVENTS CALENDAR ADVERTISING ARTICLE REPRINTS REPORT A BUG SITE MAP

ABOUT US BZ MEDIA NEWS BZ RESEARCH NEWS ON MONDAY SPTECHREPORT SPTECHWEB SPTECHCON IPHONE/IPAD DEVCON ANDROID DEVCON PRIVACY POLICY CONTACT US

HOME >> COLUMNS

Windows & .NET Watch: MVC wins MVP

By Larry O'Brien

June 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 2)
ASP.NET MVC may have a clunky name, but it’s a great technology. The official line from Microsoft is that ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms, but I don’t expect to use Web Forms as the technology for any new projects going forward.

I’ve argued that “stuff in the right place” may be the defining characteristic of good software—not functionality, nor elegance, nor adherence to any particular paradigm or coding style. What I like the most about ASP.NET MVC is that it creates a nice scaffolding for business Web applications. To be sure, the Model-View-Controller design pattern boasts a purebred heritage going back to Smalltalk and is, probably, the most well-known pattern in object-oriented programming (at least by name if not by structural detail).

ASP.NET MVC may put Smalltalk on its family crest, but it does so by way of Ruby on Rails. Rails has been, without a doubt, a trailblazer and has become my preferred technology for Web development. The trouble with Rails is that Ruby developers have been hard to find, and corporate clients are often resistant toward introducing the Ruby technology stack alongside their existing .NET or Java stacks.

In contrast, a client who had nixed Rails for an upcoming project approved ASP.NET MVC without even a blip of hesitation. The Microsoft brand still means a lot.

When a new ASP.NET MVC project is created, six different folders are generated, with names like App_Data, Controllers, Views and so forth. If you choose to generate a Test project (which you ought to do), your “Project” window will end up being fairly crowded. I have to acknowledge the school of thought that equates “ease” with “fewer files,” and I can imagine a world where we (unfortunately) see newer programmers avoiding ASP.NET MVC because of its inherent complexity.

In truth, navigating an ASP.NET MVC application is less complicated than navigating in most business applications. I have a client whose codebase is so bad that grepping from the root directory is universally acknowledged as the fastest way to find a function definition. Even though that codebase is admittedly worse than normal, it all boils down to “a place to keep your stuff,” and ASP.NET MVC encourages a set of structural conventions that aid the placement of code.

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, MVC

Pages 1 2

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33530

Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

Virtualization: Not just for machines anymore
Network virtualization allows multi-tiered applications to behave as though they were in a physical network

Magic announces the release of its revolutionary mobile offering for the development of business applications, with new native clients for iOS and Android platforms
Magic announced today the availability of native iOS and Android clients for its mobile enterprise application platform

Achievements and learning: Gamification comes to businesses and schools
Startup takes page from gamers by offering achievement marks to get developers more engaged in their projects

Zeichick’s Take: The handheld and the tablet, circa 1976
Texas Instruments' and Hewlett-Packard's calculators were doing things decades ago we take for granted today

Virtualization: Not just for machines anymore
Network virtualization allows multi-tiered applications to behave as though they were in a physical network

Achievements and learning: Gamification comes to businesses and schools
Startup takes page from gamers by offering achievement marks to get developers more engaged in their projects

Google talks tools at AnDevCon III
New 3D debugging tool and recent ADK changes are detailed by Google developers at the third Android Developer Conference

SmartBear rolls out new quality solution: API Complete
Software gives organizations ability to write test scripts and monitor APIs by bridging the DevOps divide

Creation
To write better software, cultivate your ability to be creative.

Slick...but who needs it?
compilr.com is a well-designed site and the folks behind it seem to have their heart in the right place. But...who needs it?

How to be a better software developer
Want to be a better developer? You won't get there by mastering an interesting language or learning a new set of APIs.

Wooing Galatea
Do yourself a favor and check out Galatea 2.2, a wonderful book by novelist Richard Powers.

Five SCM Best Practices Two-thirds of all software projects fail, according to the Standish Group’s CHAOS study. Improper usage of software configuration management...

Best Practices for Branching and Merging Patterns

Development teams often create a branching pattern, usually drawn out on a white board or in a Visio document, that is used as a model to...

Automated Error Reporting We invite you to read a short e-zine that tells you all about automated error reporting for .NET applications. This 8-page e-zine is packed...

The End of Application Redeploys Imagine that every time you wanted to write, send or receive an email, you needed to restart your computer. How much time would this take, a...

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

Microsoft MVC 2 preview addresses developer concerns The inclusion of helper templates, Strongly Typed UI Helpers and more as the company reacts to developer needs

Telerik extends Microsoft's MVC framework A beta of a server-based UI extension framework for the ASP.NET MVC framework aims make MVC developers more productive.

Mono bundles Microsoft's MVC framework An analyst suggests that Microsoft is embracing the open-source to stave off competition from Google.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment

Microsoft MVC 2 preview addresses developer concerns
The inclusion of helper templates, Strongly Typed UI Helpers and more as the company reacts to developer needs Read More...

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
MAY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?

Creation
To write better software, cultivate your ability to be creative.
05/19/2012 07:40 PM EST

Slick...but who needs it?
compilr.com is a well-designed site and the folks behind it seem to have their heart in the right place. But...who needs it?
05/16/2012 12:45 PM EST

How to be a better software developer
Want to be a better developer? You won't get there by mastering an interesting language or learning a new set of APIs.
05/14/2012 12:18 PM EST

Wooing Galatea
Do yourself a favor and check out Galatea 2.2, a wonderful book by novelist Richard Powers.
05/12/2012 07:05 PM EST

The world as story
An artificial-intelligence system at Carnegie Mellon seeks to understand the world by making statements about it.
05/10/2012 06:39 AM EST

The Rise of the Brogrammer, or the Rise of the Sexist Programmer?
Women in Silicon Valley get vocal about sexist ads and campaigns that contribute to a tense work environment.
05/09/2012 03:14 PM EST