Dmitry, who’s the PUM for ASP.NET, recently wrote a blog post about an interesting approach he took using VB.NET XML Literals as a view engine for ASP.NET MVC.

Now before you VB haters dismiss this blog post and leave, bear with me for just a second. Dmitry and I had a conversation one day and he noted that there are a lot of similarities between our view engine hierarchy and and normal class hierarchies.

For example, a master page is not unlike a base class. Content placeholders within a master page are similar to abstract methods. Content placeholders with default content are like virtual methods. And so on…

So he thought it would be interesting to have a class be a view rather than a template file, and put together this VB demo. One thing he left out is what the view class actually looks like in Visual Studio, which I think is kinda cool (click on image for larger view).

VB.NET XML Literal View

Notice that this looks pretty similar to what you get in the default Index.aspx view. One advantage of this approach is that you’re always using VB rather than switching over to writing markup. So if you forget to close a tag, for example, you get immediate compilation errors.

Another advantage is that your “view” is now compiled into the same assembly as the rest of your code. Of course, this could also be a disadvantage depending how you look at it.