A Little Holiday Love From The ASP.NET MVC Team

Dec 19, 2008 aspnet aspnetmvc suggest edit

A while ago ScottGu mentioned in his blog that we would try and have an ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate by the end of this year. My team worked very hard at it, but due to various unforeseeable circumstances, I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. Heck, I couldn’t even get into the office yesterday because the massive dumping of snow. I hope to get in today a little later since I’m taking next week off to be with my family coming in from Alaska.

But do not fret, we’ll have something early next year to release. In the meanwhile, we gave some rough bits to Scott Guthrie to play with and he did not disappoint yet again with a a great detailed post on some upcoming new features both in the runtime and in tooling.

Often, it’s the little touches that get me excited, and I want to call one of those out, Views without Code-Behind. This was always possible, of course, but due to some incredible hacking down in the plumbings of ASP.NET , David Ebbo with some assistance from Eilon Lipton, figured out how to get it to work with generic types using your language specific syntax for generic types. If you recall, previously it required using that complex CLR Syntax within the Inherits attribute.

Keep in mind that they had to do this without touching the core ASP.NET bits since ASP.NET MVC is a bin-deployable out-of-band release. David provided some hints on how they did this within his blog in these two posts: ProcessGeneratedCode: A hidden gem for Control Builder writers and Creating a ControlBuilder for the page itself.

ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery

In the meanwhile, Stephen Walther has been busy putting together a fun new section of the ASP.NET MVC website called the ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery.

In one of my talks about ASP.NET MVC, I mentioned a site that went live with our default drab blue project template (the site has since redesigned its look entirely). The Design Gallery provides a place for the community to upload alternative designs for our default template.

Happy Holidays

Again, I apologize that we don’t have updated bits for you to play with, but we’ll have something next year! In the meanwhile, as the end of this year winds down, I hope it was a good one for you. It certainly was a good one for me. Enjoy your holidays, have a Merry Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, Over Consumption Day, whatever it is you celebrate or don’t celebrate. ;)

Found a typo or mistake in the post? suggest edit

Comments

18 responses

Jason Gaylord • December 18th, 2008
This is one of the best Christmas gifts that I've received so far this year (but it's not Christmas yet). Thanks Phil!
Pat Gannon • December 19th, 2008
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas ...and you're living in one!
Merry Christmas to you, Akumi and the kids!
Chris Hardy • December 19th, 2008
Merry Christmas Phil, looking forward to the new year and getting in touch with the asp.net mvc team a bit more :)
Jason Whitehorn • December 19th, 2008
I love the code-behindless (is that a word?) views. The code-behind in MVC was mostly useless anyways, its good to see it go.
Nitin Reddy Katkam • December 19th, 2008
Oh. I was really looking forward to using the RTM version of the ASP.NET MVC framework for a project I'm working on. I hope the release is in January... now that would be cool - just in time for the implementation.
PS: What's with the megalomania?
Glenn Block • December 19th, 2008
Congrats Phil! Really excited to see this....And hope to first hand if I can ever get my stupid machine working :)
If I don't see you have a great holiday.
Dean Nolan • December 19th, 2008
Merry Christmas Phil and the rest of the team.
I'm looking forward to the full release as I am building a new web app using MVC.
All the best for new year.
Dean Nolan
Mark Wisecarver • December 19th, 2008
Merry Christmas bro. ;-)
Shiju Varghese • December 20th, 2008
Merry Christmas Phil and your team
siroos ghanavati • December 20th, 2008
Merry Christmas Phil ,
the best gift of new year for me is MVC release !
Stephen • December 21st, 2008
I don't think the code behind really offended me, its not like the aspx markup file really 'fits' with the mvc design anyway..
xtl • December 28th, 2008
Merry Christmas Phil and your team !
I wiil support you and your team.
Dale • January 4th, 2009
No code behind? Shades of classic ASP. Sounds like more of the new old thing.
ASP.Net MVC does not implement MVC. Controller injects between Model and View instead of a triad. Controller generates HTML which makes Controller the View. Controller should only take user actions from the View and update the Model, never the other way around.
It appears to me that this is a marketing change similar to Microsoft's vacillation between distributed applications to server applications, back to distributed and now back to server. If you don't have something new to sell, you don't have anything at all to sell. The solution: package something old and call it new.
I don't mind the architecture, but why call it MVC? Is it so important to implement MVC or, for that matter, any particular pattern? If good web design can be improved to include all of the benefits of ASP.Net MVC, just document a new design pattern, such as Separate Domain from View, or Create Separate Business and DataLayer. If you remember that desing patterns are nothing more than elements of re-usable object oriented software, it is obvious that we do not have to use every identified pattern in every environment. Just as I won't use my tucked-away image manipulation library in a simple console application, it may not be best to use MVC in a disconnected state application such as a web page. Even though it does make sense to separate business logic and UI logic and to do test driven development, these benefits are available without MVC.
Travis • January 5th, 2009
@Dale, my controllers never generate HTML, so your argument that "Controllers are Views" kinda confuses me. Can you elaborate? Or am I just way off?
Mike • January 12th, 2009
@Dale, my controllers never generate HTML either. Maybe you are using controllers that way, but the framework is certainly capable of not generating html at the controller level. As for the MVC team, I have been ignoring MS web development since classic ASP because I did not like webforms. I am now very excited about MVC and have a project just waiting for release ready to go. Any clue when we will see the RC so at least we know we are close to final feature set?
Ngoc Luu • January 14th, 2009
Hi Haacked,
In the ASP.NET Webform world, it has a special file called app_offline.htm. Will it be supported in MVC?
rtpHarry • January 19th, 2009
Hey, you can check out my design gallery entry at the following location: http://www.asp.net/mvc/gallery/View.aspx?itemid=71
.Net RBAC • January 28th, 2009
Even I hope that RTM version of the ASP.NET will be released soon. As its the end of January..