New Year, new projects, new challenges and also some nice new upcoming technologies. So given this is a new blog I wanted to make my first post a bit of a reference post detailing a nice new ASP.NET 3.5 Extension Project which is currently in CTP. From the Extensions information page:
The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is a new release that provides new functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET in 2008. This release delivers a set of new features that target:
- Enabling High Productivity Data Scenarios – including MVC, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and dynamic data
- Supporting Test Driven Development – including a powerful and extensible MVC framework
- Creating the best server for Rich Clients – including Ajax history support and Silverlight controls for ASP.NET
Now the part that I have been very interested in is the MVC Framework for ASP.NET.
MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, it is a high-level design pattern which effectively separates business objects and data from presentation (explanation). MVC is by far a new concept in programming and it is not even new to ASP.NET. Projects like MonoRail have been developing a reliable MVC framework for quite some time so why am I interested in what Microsoft have brought to the table?
Well that is kind of like asking why use ASP.NET over PHP for me, I will happily use both but one has different features and functionality to the other. But reading through blogs from the likes of Scott Guthrie, Fredrik Normén and others I am impressed by the levels of functionality the frameworks brings.
There is little point discussing the details nor workings of the framework, I more wanted to raise awareness of it as I feel that it is a very useful and powerful development tool. However I realise that not everyone shares the view. Still it will be interesting to see how the project matures.
Links:
ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview
