Fervent Coder

I was wondering around in the DevConnections exhibitor area and Phil Haack and his camera guy came by and interviewed me.  He asked me a few questions about the conference.  This is my second time at DevConnections and it keeps getting better every time I come.  For instance, Phil asked what my favorite session was so far and without skipping a beat I said "MVC."  In my last post I mentioned that I have been waiting to see a presentation on MVC and when I heard they were having one here, I made sure that I attended that session.  The speakers, Scott Hanselman and Eilon Lipton played very well off of each other.

I think I threw Phil off for a minute with my answer (because he is the new PM for MVC Framework), but I really did mean it.  I have been interesting in seeing Microsoft's answer to something that has been lacking in ASP.NET since it's inception.  Now there is a way to do MVC today with WWF, but I don't think I would recommend it.  I should have elaborated a little more, but you always think of things you should have said later.  It's not always easy to be eloquent when you are off the cuff.

My second favorite presentation is one that I will be blogging about later.  It has to do with Microsoft and Open Source.

Thanks Phil.  I appreciate the opportunity and maybe next time I can be more eloquent. :D

George Wallace's "I Be Thinkin" is a great show.  A friend took me out to it and I heard a Yodeling version of "Milkshake" sung by six guys who use their voices to do all of the instrumentation: Mosaic.  They opened for George Wallace.  George Wallace is as funny as I remember and it is a different show every night because he interacts so much with the audience and plays off of them.  I highly recommend it to anyone that comes out to Vegas.  It is a late show at 10PM, so if you are coming from the Midwest or east coast, you might not go on your first or second night here or you might be fighting to stay awake. :D

This was my first chance to see the MVC (model view controller) Framework as when I was at Tulsa TechFest, I was presenting at the same time and didn't get to see Palermo's version of it.  I was blown away by Scott Hanselman's great presentation skills.  He is definitely a great speaker.  Phil Haack was also in the audience (the new PM for the MVC Framework).  I am really excited about seeing this come out.  Like Monorail, you can also plug in Brail or NVelocity as well as the default.  Being able to have options is what I believe Microsoft keeps doing right lately. 

One thing that Scott pointed out more than once so I took note: MVC is not Web Forms 4.0.  It is an alternative framework to ASP.NET Web Forms. 

So what is MVC? The asp.net (or other forms) are the view or presentation.  The information or domain specific stuff is the model, and the view is displayed based on the controller, which handles taking items based on the model and giving it to the view. The controller has knowledge of both the view and the model.  It basically responds to events and hands changes off to the model.  It creates a great separation of concerns because each page is only concerned about a specific task or action.  The other pages do not need to know about each other, they just link to actions.  The controller handles mapping the actions to actual pages.

I really like that I saw you can plug in your own components as I watched Microsoft employees using Castle Windsor for IoC and Rhino Mocks for TDD. 

It was funny that Scott asked out into the audience about who was using TDD and hands went up.  Then he asked who was really using TDD, and all hands dropped except one.

Phil just did a great post on some of what they talked about here.  MVC + Rhino.Mocks.  Done.

UPDATE:  Scott posted about the presentation here.