I am a firm believer in learning best practices. I enjoy reading and studying SOLID and how to spot violations in the wild. I whole-heartedly concur with Separation of Concerns, Behavior-Driven development, lean software development and a hundred other things that have really cool buzz-wordy names and make me sound really smart. All these things only serve to enhance one binding truth about software development: it a thinking exercise.

You can master every GoF pattern, and be the master of every OR/M. You can spend endless nights studying OOP/OOD principles and make flash cards for recognizing SOLID violations. But if you are merely relying on your ability to recall these things while coding, you will misuse, misrepresent and munge everything up. These are all merely connectors for that big tool between your ears.

So if you think you can write software by simply following the advice of books and principles, think again.

~Lee

For those of you following the MVC releases, you will see something new in your File->New for MVC3 RC: _ViewStart.cshtml (_ViewStart.vbhtml for you VBers). This is a common place to dry out view dependencies. The most common view dependency is the MasterView it will use. To that end, the default _ViewStart page you get from a File->New MVC3 project has just the:

   1: @{

   2:     Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";

   3: }

This seems to be done by convention. The view must be named “_viewstart.cshtml” or it will not be used. It also does not apply to partial views (since they are not really a page).

Hope this helps,

Lee