F1 Web Challenge – It’s on!!!

(2 blog posts in one day??? Unheard of…)

The F1 Web Challenge is a charity event where programmers and developers from all over Central Minnesota come together to create a website for a non-profit organization. It’s a 24 hour geek-a-thon that happens every year, and it’s a pretty cool deal. I’m really looking forward to it, I’ve never really done anything like this before, so now I get to see how good I really am at this programming thing.

ASP.NET MVC – Not all it’s cracked up to be…

When I heard that Microsoft was coming out with an MVC framework, I was pretty excited. I remember learning about MVC when I was studying Java, and Objective-C/Cocoa on the Mac uses it quite a bit too, so I was happy that MS finally got on the bandwagon.

But after playing with it some, I really think the implementation is completely messed up. I get the whole URL routing thing for controller classes, but they overlooked something huge. ViewState. There is no support for ViewState, so any server controls that rely on ViewState (which is pretty much all of them) are useless. I tried to drop a Label control on my page and set its text value in the code-behind, and it wouldn’t even recognize it.

Maybe there’s a reason for it that I’m not understanding, but losing the ability to drop a control on my page and set its properties in the code-behind is a HUGE drawback.

Scott Guthrie wrote an excellent series of blog posts about MVC in his blog, and they do cover all the essentials, so if you’re interested in learning about the MVC framework, I suggest checking out his blog.

They are promising some new enhancements to the MVC framework soon, so I’ll be checking them out and reporting back. But until there is support for ViewState functionality, it’s still a long way off.