ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 is out!

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ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 has been released, and they’ve made some significant changes to the previous release. Scott Hanselman has a nice series of videos on the new features, and while it seems they have cleaned up the code quite a bit, they are still lacking the support for ViewState. I just can’t get over having to write all the inline C# code in my view. It’s ugly, it’s a maintenance nightmare, and I just plain don’t like it. I’m really hoping they remedy this before the final release.

I will post more details on the changes when I have some time to really dig into them. Until then, while MVC is a great technology, and one with a lot of promise, but there are still many details that need to be added if they want developers to really embrace this.

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.