There’s an old saying, “Good things come to those who wait.” I remember when I first joined the ASP.NET MVC project, I (and many customers) wanted to include a new streamlined custom view engine. Unfortunately at the time, it wasn’t in the card since we had higher priority features to implement.
Well the time for a new view engine has finally come as announced by Scott Guthrie in this very detailed blog post.
While I’m very excited about the new streamlined syntax, there’s a lot under the hood I’m also excited about.
Andrew Nurse, who writes the parser for the Razor syntax, provides more under-the-hood details in this blog post. Our plan for the next version of ASP.NET MVC is to make this the new default view engine, but for backwards compatibility we’ll keep the existing WebForm based view engine.
As part of that work, we’re also focusing on making sure ASP.NET MVC tooling supports any view engine. In ScottGu’s blog post, if you look carefully, you’ll see Spark listed in the view engines drop down in the Add View dialog. We’ll make sure it’s trivially easy to add Spark, Haml, whatever, to an ASP.NET MVC project. :)
Going back to Razor, one benefit that I look forward to is that unlike an ASPX page, it’s possible to fully compile a CSHTML page without requiring the ASP.NET pipeline. So while you can allow views to be compiled via the ASP.NET runtime, it may be possible to fully compile a site using T4 for example. A lot of cool options are opened up by a cleanly implemented parser.
In the past several months, our team has been working with other teams around the company to take a more holistic view of the challenges developing web applications. ScottGu recently blogged about the results of some of this work:
- SQLCE 4 – Medium trust x-copy deployable database for ASP.NET.
- IIS Express – A replacement for Cassini that does the right thing.
The good news is there’s a lot more coming! In some cases, we had to knock some heads together (our heads and the heads of other teams) to drive focus on what developers really want and need rather than too much pie in the sky architectural astronomy.
I look forward to talking more about what I’ve been working on when the time is right. :)