I've heard that the approaching umbraco 5 i going to be based on asp.net MVC. Does it mean that the developers will have to be familiar with the MVC? Will you please tell me what the exact meaning of being "based on MVC"?
Umbraco 5 has been cancelled. Fortunately, a small team of developers has decided to fork the project:
http://www.rebelcms.com/
It means exactly what it says: Umbraco 5 will be an ASP.NET MVC3 application instead of being a webforms application.
This indeed means that your developers will soon need to be familiar with MVC, although, it is quite feasable that most of the Razor concepts are already known to your developers.
If you have more specific questions, don't hesitate to post them. A better area would be http://our.umbraco.org though, the community is quite large and much more responsive there than on Stack Overflow.
This is very intesting stuff about Umbraco 5, as I know Sitecore, for example, should include support of MVC as well. But they will support both variants for developers ASP.NET and ASP MVC. That from my point of view much better. May be Umbraco 5 will be have the same
Related
Has Microsoft said anything in the past year about Sharepoint supporting MVC (in a nice, non-hacky way)?
I know Scott Gu said something on the subject, but that was just shy of 3 years ago (Feb 2008).
Are they still "looking at it" for the future? (3 years seems a long time to be "looking")
Did they decide against it? (the whole MVC thing is just a fad, it will die out...?)
Or have they been mute on the subject?
(We are about to embark on an enterprise level implementation of Sharepoint and I am worried that we are investing a lot of time and money into an old way of doing things.)
Note: I know that there are questions like this out there, but they seem to be about a year old, so I thought I would ask again.
Don't hold your breath for SharePoint to go MVC. SharePoint contains a lot of custom controls that would have to be rewritten completely, if they changed the underlying model. Changing from ASP.NET Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC would probably result in a whole different branch of SharePoint - think SharePoint MVC. And if Microsoft was to go that way, they would probably choose a different path for that solution, perhaps even backing the open source CMS Umbraco.
I personally believe that MVC is not a fad. It you care about what your html ends up looking like, then ASP.NET MVC is a great platform. And with the popularity of HTML 5 rising, I see the same thing happening for ASP.NET MVC.
It's a huge breaking change, so I'm ruling it out for SharePoint 2010, also because newer MVC Versions are .net 4.0 only and SharePoint 2010 is .net 3.5 and will highly unlikely go to 4.0, again because it's a huge breaking change.
I saw some hackish attempts, but getting even Routing to work with the Virtual Path Provider of Sharepoint...
I'd say: Wait for SharePoint 2014 or whatver the next Version will be.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Treat it as a platform that you plug in to, so the way it works doesn't have a huge impact on your implementation apart from around web parts. If it goes MVC then everyone will have the same pain of moving their web parts from the current model to an MVC type rendering one so MS will have to provide some help in making the transition.
This link is about a year old but I thought the author's perspective on the choice between SharePoint (a platform) and ASP.NET MVC (a framework) was refreshing at the time. I've had experience with both and I've gotta say that I'd be hesitant to mix the two technologies right now.
The only thing I think is safe to say right now is that SharePoint is here to stay and ASP.NET MVC is gaining tremendous popularity / support and is unlikely to go away.
EDIT: There are also a number of comments in that link that might relate to your question.
I've tried a few google searches and stack over flow searches, but this is proving hard to find than I thought. I need to provide justification to management for our shop to move to ASP.NET MVC 2. The biggest help would be any enterprise level sites or major web development shops that are using ASP.NET MVC 1/2.
Does anyone have a list or link?
I know Stackoverflow uses it, but some stats such as daily views would help too. I found the Jwaala case study here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/case_study_detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000006675 . Aside from that, I'm having some issues finding some professional examples.
Thanks in advance!
Just found a few more case studies:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Search_Results.aspx?Type=1&Keywords=mvc&LangID=46#top
Could still use more links.
If your management requires a "...but THEY're doing it!!!" justification then you have larger problems.
If you're using the "...but THEY're doing it!!!" justification then you'll likely need much better reasons.
Hate to troll, but just saying that you'll want objective and project-specific reasoning. And if by "management" you mean business-management, then they need to understand that engineering details are best left up to engineering. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is full of advice along these lines.
...and to qualify this, I'm a web-developer working on a partial rewrite of a WebForms app. I'd love to be using MVC for this project, but the actual benefit of doing so doesn't match the cost--business is business after all, and the business-case must be considered.
If you do get stuck with WebForms then you can whip it into shape (what we're doing). With ASP.NET 4.0 (or a little inheritance trickery) you can get rid of the ID renaming; by building ViewModels, domain-objects, and clean Repositories you can avoid a lot of the cruft of WebForms--we have tight, explicit control over what WebForms generates. We've shrunk the actual content of our ASPX pages and their codebehinds by at least an order of magnitude by applying best practices.
Just remember, the tools won't make you a better developer, and unless you know what you're doing or what you're working with then you won't reap the benefits.
Dell is rebuilding its page from ASP.NET Webforms into ASP.NET MVC as Phil Haack is mentioned this on his blog ;)
I can not say if they use MVC 1 or MVC 2.
It seems that MarketWatch use ASP.NET MVC with Spark View Engine as listed here :
http://sparkviewengine.com/spark-in-the-field
http://www.marketwatch.com/
also an e-commerce webiste :
http://www.fancydressoutfitters.co.uk/
Check our sites www.reifen.com and www.bonspneus.fr. They handle pretty big traffic in germany and france.
We have used ASP.NET MVC 1 on these sites and still use (and enjoy) ASP.NET on other sites. Like others said: don't just go with ASP.NET MVC because it is in some way better. It is not. There is allways a situation where I would prefer one or the other.
Additional "live" ASP.NET MVC sites (some broken links)
http://weblogs.asp.net/mikebosch/archive/2008/05/05/gallery-of-live-asp-net-mvc-sites.aspx
I aim to try use DevExpress web server controls (which are awesome) in an ASP.NET MVC project (some articles I read on 'net seems to indicate the two can work well together).
I'm eager to start a new project using ASP.NET MVC, and I have been reading up a lot on ASP.NET MVC lately, but I'm not sure if I should invest a project in it. My concern is that it may turn out to be like LINQ to SQL, which is essentially been killed off since MS will not be providing updates.
Is ASP.NET MVC a viable solution to invest in my case?
Yes definitely ASP.NET MVC or any other MVC framework is worth learning. MVC pattern is all about seperation of concerns and helps you to keep your code clean.
If you like Devexpress control too much you could be disappointed because there is no server side control in ASP.NET MVC. But if you want to learn Web's underlying mechanism,HTML, Javascript , clean code, TDD ASP.NET MVC is a good way to go.
Learn first, experiment later
Asp.net MVC is a great development platform for building web applications, so it's definitely worth your time to learn it through and through.
But I suggest you first learn MVC framework and build at least one semi complex app with it and then start experimenting with mixing MVC with web forms controls. It is possible but as much you think you will gain you'll probably loose more. So I would be a bit reluctant and advise you not to match these. At least not on a Greenfield project.
In other words: presumably knowing Asp.net web forms would you suggest someone to heavy use dynamicly created user controls in their web pages if they're just about to learn the technology of Asp.net web forms? Probably not. Or mixing web forms with ASP pages on a greenfield project...
Instead try finding great either MVC-friendly server extensions or client-side libraries that will help you create rich web apps like ExtJS (I don't work for ExtJS llc, but I used the lib on a project in the past and liked it a lot). Using something like this you won't loose stuff from MVC and gain great user experience and rich functionality.
Seeing how you're asking the question on this site, I'd say YES!
DevExpress has a bunch of MVC specialized controls, that use Ajax to get data from the server via callbacks. You can see demos of the controls here:
http://mvc.devexpress.com.
I am not sure if you can use the web forms controls, my understanding is that you can't.
Also, regarding LinqToSql, you don't have to use that. I am using NHibernate for the data layer and it works very nice with MVC.
I worked with asp.net and web forms for more than 5 years and at least 1 year with the DevExpress controls for asp.net, but now I love MVC so much that I think I don't want to go back to the web forms anytime soon.
Hope this helped.
I work for a small website company (couple of programmers, couple of designers). Currently we use ASP.NET website projects - this makes it easy for me to sort the programming out on my local machine, while the designers work directly on a development server and the 'on-the-fly' compilation allows them to see any changes made without having to compile and deploy the website (and all tied up with SVN).
I'd like to start using ASP.NET MVC for pretty much all the reasons that makes it different from Webforms (logical urls, no viewstate, more control over html, unit testing etc..) but don't want to make the dev process over complicated, so:
Any reasons you can't set MVC websites up as website projects instead of Apps so they don't have to be explicitly compiled throughout the dev process? (Our 'live' websites all use web compilation projects anyway).
Will this still allow unit testing?
Is there any other way of allowing the designers to develop MVC sites in the same way as they currently do? Note: They use Dreamweaver, so no Cassini development server.
Can anyone advise with any of the above (even if only to tell me my dev process makes no sense.. :)
Thanks.
ASP.NET MVC is a great platform no matter what type of project. If you already understand the basics of HTTP and how websites actually work ASP.NET MVC will be like the thing missing from your life. If you're used to the postback model of ASP.NET WebForms it may be a little harder to grasp at first but it's very easy to understate. It's basically a stateless model. Your controller is given some parameters, it writes back some HTML... end of story until the next request.
I don't think so, and I think the reason for this was to allow bin-deployable ASP.NET MVC projects. You can publish an ASP.NET MVC app straight from Visual Studio 2008 without the end server ever even having to know about ASP.NET MVC, as long as it has ASP.NET 3.5 (with SP1 I think)
ASP.NET MVC is all about unit testing, it's extremely flexible in this matter and even some of the design decisions behind ASP.NET MVC are based off allowing users to unit test their code. Scott Guthrie specifically names unit testing in the latest release of ASP.NET MVC (beta) http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/16/asp-net-mvc-beta-released.aspx#six
Any controls that work with ASP.NET WebForms will work with ASP.NET MVC as long as it does not rely on postback. If it does than you cannot use that control/code.
MVC is a proven design pattern for websites and even the very one you posted your question on is based on ASP.NET MVC and was built by only a few people and is now maintained by 1 (one) person (soon to be 2). I currently am using it for 3 private projects and I love it. I've seen the light and I will never go back to WebForms.
Resources:
Scott Guthrie's blog
Phil Haack's blog
Rob Conery's blog He has created an MVC Storefront demo over 25+ videos.
Scott Hanselman's blog
Stephen Walther's blog
PDC08 ASP.NET MVC Session Session was with Phil Haack and Jeff Atwood (creator of this site).
HTH!
I used to be an ASP.NET developer. Recently I started developing with Django and do so with one other developer remotely via SVN. I find that MVC frameworks make small projects even easier, and larger projects a lot less painful than oldschool ASP.NET did.
Templates are far easier to control and style than the web controls in ASP.NET. Separation of logic (beyond the code-behind methodology) makes it easier for more than one person to be working on different parts of the site at the same time. RESTful design centered around actions starts making a lot more sense after having to deal with ASP.NET page life cycle issues long enough. Also, the URL-driven routing and the ability to do reverse lookups means fewer hard coded links in your code, its easier to add new sections to your site, etc.
To answer some of your questions:
I'm not sure about live compilation, but its easy enough to write some simple deployment tools to automate this process.
Unit testing is often easier on an MVC framework thanks to actions in controllers compartmentalizing the logic much better.
ASP.NET MVC allows you to use webforms as the default template language, but I'd advise looking into cleaner templating languages such as NVelocity. Any HTML-centric templating system is going to be better than webforms because of how difficult it is to tame and style even simple aspects of web controls.
This site uses MVC. I think the team behind StackOverflow qualifies as a small shop. They have a lot of experience though. Still, considering how many people are involved (a few) and the number of servers, yeah, it's small. And it runs very well in my opinion.
I have seen the ASP.NET community buzzing about MVC. I know the basics of its origin, and that there are many sites (unless I am mistaken, stack overflow itself) based on ASP.NET MVC.
From everything I have heard and read about MVC it seems to be the future of ASP.NET development. But since I don't usually dabble in .NET web development I am left wondering the following: when is it appropriate to use MVC and when is it not, and why? Examples of great (and terrible) use of MVC would be fascinating.
Though I realize there are other implementations of MVC view other languages like RoR I am more interested on its impact for .NET programmers.
If this has already been gone over, my apologies!
Here are my 2 cents about MVC for web applications. For the sort of GUI apps for which MVC was originally intended, "listener" code was required, so that the UI could be updated when events altered the model data.
In MVC for the web this is unnecessary, you get your listener for free: the web server, and the HTTP request IS the event. So really MVC for the web should be even simpler. Indeed, it could be boiled down to the Mediator pattern, where the Controller mediates between the model and the view.
There are two things that there is a lot of confusion about. Regardless of conventional "wisdom":
Frameworks != MVC
Database Data != "Model"
"Full stack" web development frameworks typically add lots of features, and may or may not be MVC-oriented at their core. One of the features many frameworks add is database access or object relational mapping functionality, and because frameworks and MVC get confused, subsequently database data and the model facet of MVC also get confused. The model can generally be viewed as the underlying data for the application, but it does NOT have to come from a database. A good example might be a wiki, where the underlying model/data consists of file revision data, for instance, from RCS.
Hope this helps and I'm sure others will have plenty to add.
I would say one very compelling scenario to use MVC is if you have a group of experienced .NET developers who dont have experience with WebForms.
Coming from that situation myself (very little web experience) I found it I was much more productive and comfortable using MVC over WebForms.
I found it very hard to pickup WebForms due to the aforementioned abstraction - (I think proof of WebForms complexity is I have never met anyone who I would consider a WebForms "guru" i.e. knows the Page Lifecycle off by heart/Data Binding back-to-front etc.).
Using MVC actually allowed me to use my .NET and software experience without needing to heavily invest in learning the WebForms framework. Not only that but I got a much better understanding of HTTP, and this I think would allow higher quality solutions.
IMHO MVC allows you to factor code much better than WebForms, so I think developers with lots of "patterns" experience will be more comfortable in MVC.
ASP.NET MVC isn't the future of ASP.NET development it is just a new way of developing websites with ASP.NET. Microsoft have made it clear they will continue supporting and improving both WebForms and MVC in the future.
I cannot think of any websites, were it would not be appropriate to use MVC. You could also argue the same for WebForms.
Whether you choose one over the other is a personal choice, and would depend on the development team's experience and preferences.
I personally would never go back to WebForms development after using MVC on several big projects. WebForms in my opinion places an unnecessary abstraction layer over http and html. For quick prototypes you can get something cobbled together quicker with WebForms, but after that the complication of the abstraction makes things harder rather than easier. The only compelling reason to use WebForms in my opinion is the rich level of 3rd party controls that are currently available. But you can mix WebForms and MVC, so its easy enough to get the best of both worlds.
I work in a shop that has both ASP.NET and MVC applications. I think originally I was biased toward web forms because I worked with them from several years, but after working on a few MVC projects I prefer it.
Something to consider, however, is that if you have a team of experienced web form developers initial progress in an MVC application will be a slower because of the learning curve, so if the timeline for a project is very tight it might not be the best time to transition.
Aside from that I can't think of any situations where I'd prefer web forms over MVC at this point.
Based on my own experience, I can tell you that if you don't have any Winforms or Webforms background, you may feel more comfortable under the MVC umbrella because you are not "expecting" anything from the ASP.NET Webforms world.
On the other side, as a recommendation, I encourage you to check out other MVC frameworks like Django or RoR that are more mature to "be water" on the MVC way of thinking. I'm happy with ASP.NET MVC but looking other solutions helps you to understand better the paradigm behind the framework.