As most of you already know Scott has announced that the Dynamic Data (see screencast) is going to have an MVC compatible version.

It appears that Rob Conery and SubSonic team have worked on MVC compatible version of SubSonic code-named Makai.

As you can see from the screen bellow, they implemented a ScaffoldController<T>, where T is a "model" portion of the MVC.  By inheriting from ScaffoldController<T> and declaring your model class, Makai framework implements all of the Create, Update, Delete, List actions for your controllers and generates dynamic views.  Therefore creating a prototype is a breeze.

I  do understand that a lot of MVC purist do tend to ignore the Scaffolding portion of the MVC, but it is a necessary evil.  MVC is a new technology in .Net world and it is hard to sell it to many IT managers.  But sometimees when they see how rapidly we develop a prototype  they might consider looking further.

Same as dynamic data, Makai generates a set of initial templates, that the list,edit and update views are using.  These templates can be overriden/modified and that is one way for us to get some flexibility in a defining the layout of the views in a prototype.

In addition to that, since Makai implementation is based on the controller, we simply can enrich the functionality by adding the new Actions/Views to our ScaffoldingController class.  This allows us to "evolve" the prototype into the product over time, instead of having to drop all of the prototype and start from scratch.

 For more details on Makai please visit Ron Conery's blog here.

Well, it seems that man himself has spoken about details of this upcoming framework.  He has given us a timeline as well as what the framework encompasses.  What I find interesting is that it seems that Microsoft is not just building a "copy" of an open source project, replacing all of the Open Source libraries with their own, but actually building a framework that can interoperate with OpenSource libraries.

In other words, you are not limited to ObjectBuilder as an IoC container, you will be able to plug in Spring.Net, or Windsor, nor you are limited to MSTEST when it comes to unit testing.  I am truly surprised by these news from Microsoft.  Congratulations to Scott and his team.

Scott's post can be found at:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx

I have had several moments in my career where I was near a point of just simply giving up on MS and joining the "other side".  I remember the time few months before .Net 1.0 was released.  Java camp was leading the development world with innovations, while MS kept trying to persuade us that VB/COM was the way to go.  At that time I even joined the Java team at my company almost entirely making a switch.   

Then I was given an opportunity to review technologies for complete replacement of one of the ASP sites, project I was assigned to lead.  I evaluated obviously ASP, JSP, and soon to be released ASP.Net (learning C# at the same time).  And the thing that stroked me then was: "My God, sleeping giant has awaken!"  There was no question in my mind that C#/.Net was not a mere Java clone, but a well thought of framework and language that went one step further.  In addition there was nothing like ASP.NET available on the market.   

We started on the project the week .Net was released.  Completed it month ahead of schedule.  I stayed in MS camp.  

Another moment was just recently.  For any of you that read my blog you will know that I am really big fan of the Agile process and specifically Test Driven Development.  One of the problems with the TDD is being able to write/define tests/behaviors throughout your code including all layers of the application.  And we all know that sometimes UI code can prove virtually untestable.  That is where flavors of MVC/MVP patterns come in.  They help us solve that problem.  

MVC being doable in windows forms (using IoC, and frameworks like CAB), it was nearly impossible to accomplish it in the ASP.NET web development.  

That is when I saw my first demo of Ruby on Rails.  Everything that was missing, or done wrong in ASP.NET was implemented right in Ruby.  No huge configuration files, XML that "generates", code, source code versioning and schema migration are coordinated.  Schema is defined in one place only.  OR Mapping and the ActiveRecord pattern implemented flawlessly.  Ruby uses a true MVC implementation.  And it is all easy to learn and implement.  And productivity gained in developing, maintaining, migrating/updating, deploying these web apps is enormous.  

These concepts have been around for a few years.  Loads of Java folks and already some of the .Net folks are moving into Rails development.  Yet Microsoft stayed quiet about this, having virtually none of these features in upcoming VS2008.   

And right about time I am truly about to give up on MS altogether, I read this post from Jeffrey Palermo about an announcement of the MVC framework Scott Guthrie and his team are working on to be released as an add-on to the VS 2008.  Here are the goals of that project:

·  Natively support TDD model for controllers.

·  Provide ASPX (without viewstate or postbacks) as a view engine

·  Provide a hook for other view engines from MonoRail, etc.

·  Support IoC containers for controller creation and DI on the controllers

·  Provide complete control over URLs and navigation

·  Be pluggable throughout

·  Separation of concerns

·  Integrate nicely within ASP.NET

·  Support static as well as dynamic languages  

Folks familiar with MonoRail might say that there is all that built in the MonoRail project and lot more (ActiveRecord, Windsor, etc), and I agree with that.  But having all this come from Microsoft (with all of the visibility that comes with it), can only be a good thing.  I applaud Scott and his team - this is what I and bunch of the folks I know have been waiting for.  And yes, I think I will stay in MS camp for a while now.