The ASP.NET Routing engine used by ASP.NET MVC plays a very important role. Routes map incoming requests for URLs to a Controller and Action. They also are used to construct an URL to a Controller/Action. In this way, they provide a two-way mapping between URLs and controller actions.

Yesterday, Wally McClure interviewed me for the ASP.NET Podcast Show. We chatted for around half an hour on my background, Microsoft, and ASP.NET MVC.

I have a set of little demos apps I’ve been working on that I want to release to the public. I need to clean them up a bit (you’d be surprised how much I swear in comments) and make sure they work with the CTP. Hopefully I will publish them on my blog over the next few weeks.

Love them or hate them, the ALT.NET mailing list is a source of interesting debate, commentary and insight. I can’t help myself but to participate. Debate is good. Stifling debate is bad. Period. End of debate. (see!? That was bad!)

Eilon Lipton, the lead developer on the ASP.NET MVC project shares some of his thoughts on the design philosophy guiding the shaping of the framework.

UPDATE: ASP.NET MVC now works with Visual Web Developer Express SP1

UPDATE: Completely ignore the contents of this post. All of this is out-dated. Test specific subclasses are no longer necessary with ASP.NET MVC since our April CodePlex refresh

UPDATE: Much of this post is out-of-date with the latest versions of MVC. We long sinced removed the ControllerAction attribute.

One of the guiding principles in the design of the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is enabling TDD (Test Driven Development) when building a web application. If you want to follow along, this post makes use of ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4 which you’ll need to install from CodePlex. I’ll try and keep this post up to date with the latest releases, but it may take me time to get around to it.

Sometimes when writing unit tests, you run into the case where you want to override the behavior of a specific method.

Note that in the same vein as Pele, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, Joel has reach that Brazillian Soccer player level of stardom in the geek community and can pretty much go by just his first name. Admit it, you knew who I was referring to in the title. Admit it!

Oren Eini, aka Ayende, writes about his dissatisfaction with Microsoft reproducing the efforts of the OSS community. His post was sparked by the following thread in the ALT.NET mailing list:

Despite an international team of committers to Subtext and the fact that MySpace China uses a customized version of Subtext for its blog, I am ashamed to say that Subtext’s support for internationalization has been quite weak.

My friend (and former boss and business partner) Micah found this gem of a quote from Donald Knuth addressing code proofs.

I’m currently doing some app building with ASP.NET MVC in which I try to cover a bunch of different scenarios. One scenario in particular I wanted to cover is approaching an application using a Test Driven Development approach. I especially wanted to cover using various Dependency Injection frameworks, to make sure everything plays nice.

Frans Bouma wrote an interesting response to my last post, Writing Testable Code Is About Managing Complexity entitled Correctness Provability should be the goal, not Testability.

When discussing the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework, one of the key benefits I like to tout is how this framework will improve testability of your web applications.

In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (title long enough for you?), James Surowiecki argues that decisions made by a crowd are generally better than those made by any single individual in the group.

Seen in Twitter today

Last week I was busy in Las Vegas at the DevConnections/OpenForce conferences, and unlike that pithy but over-used catch-phrase, what happens at a conference in Vegas should definitely not stay in Vegas but should be blogged (only things during sessions that won’t get anyone in trouble).