Saturday, April 05, 2008 12:54 PM
Having a ball here in Minneapolis (although the lack of sleep is going to smack me in a little bit...if not already)...
My presentation went well enough I think. I ran into some hardware/software issues, and I need to better streamline how I cover the different aspects of how the MVC projects are structured. I also discovered an important rule when it comes to technology presentations:
Don't assume that its as easy for something to work the way you think it would.
Especially with the MVC framework. I'm doing a talk this afternoon on using the MVC pattern without the MVC framework...and I realized this morning how much I *still* haven't gotten my head around the concepts in the MVC framework. I found myself trying to dim up a controller in the view code behind...which doesn't work as well as when you use, say, the HTML helpers in the ASPX page.
I also realized that you can't pass in multiple values easily from a view to a controller...wait...no, let me rephrase that:
I also realized that its not incredibly obvious about how to pass multiple values easily from a view to a controller. By that, I mean that you need to know about the helper objects that support it (whether that be at the aspx level or using the Controller.ReadFromRequest method, etc.).
I was talking with a colleague, and he mentioned that at the recent VSLive event a presenter told him that the MVC Framework, as it is now, will be good for content-driven apps (that notion supported by the release of Kigg) but not for business applications. As a community, I think this is where we need to focus for providing feedback to the ASP.NET team, and also leverage what's already in the Rails or MonoRail community (there are obviously business apps developed with those technologies, so what is the MVC framework missing that the others have?).
Anyway, it was a great session...for myself for sure, and I hope for those that were in attendance. I'll be posting a more fleshed out example this week to make up for my demonstration that fell short.
D