Surging Popularity of the ASP.NET MVC Framework

Business Web Apps

There is a continuing major interest in being able to produce highly functional Line of Business applications over the web and in the Cloud so that all devices can access and interact with the software application. Desktop, mobile, whatever.

MVC Pattern

The MVC pattern was created many years ago in the Unix world and is at the root of many other patterns that we have all been using in Microsoft Technologies like Silverlight and WPF MVVM and also the precursor MVP which is an offshoot of MVC as well.

ASP.NET MVC Framework

The MVC Framework has evolved and greatly improved the ability to provide many solid approaches to further support very rapid development processes and increased testability of controllers, action methods etc.

Having the use of HTML5 templates and the strength and power of ASP.NET functionalities just makes it even more possible to develop large, complex Line of Business applications that can be delivered over the web.

Layout pages

I really like this capability to do whatever you need to do once for the entire web app in one layout page, increases the consistency of UX look and feel.

RESTful Services

The way the URL routing and formatting can be done in any design concept that the development team wants to use is a powerful way to enhance the ability to have more REST based services, further separating concerns and providing more architectural flexibility.

Logging in Silverlight

The prism logging facade interface for silverlight/wpf allows custom loggers into log4net or whatever you use. Silverlight is always a bit harder to implement but with a service interface back to your web server.

An easy way to implement this in your bootstrapper....

// CustomLogger is a custom logger implementation to whatever you would like.


CustomLogger logger= new CustomLogger();

protected override ILoggerFacade LoggerFacade
{

get


{
    return logger;

}



}

ASP.NET 4 Routing

Just read nice article by Peter Vogel on implementing Routing with ASP.NET 4.

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2010/03/04/routing-in-aspnet4.aspx

It's interesting how ASP.NET MVC Framework method of url routing has influenced the technical implementation of routing in the framework. Very nice. Cleaner and easier to maintain.

I'm a major proponent of the MVC architectural design pattern in general. Before the ASP.NET MVC Framework was available, I was doing a customized implementation based on a componentized modular architectural approach with modules based on business entity and functional areas with views being either aspx pages or user controls assembled dynamically on master pages.

Silverlight Media Framework

This is some of the most advanced streaming techniques and re-branding capabilities for Silverlight developers I have seen. Download it here and read about it here http://smf.codeplex.com/

Silverlight and Expression Blend Interactivity and 3D

The Matrix3D struct in Expression Blend 3 Interactivity lib has some very nice capabilities to go farther with animations and morphing objects rotating in a more 3D context.

LINQ to SQL and enabling for WCF use

I have noticed that a lot of people think that they have to create separate data contract classes that are marked with the Data Contract and Data Member attributes. If you want to use the OR Designer generated LINQ to SQL classes as data contracts, you can just modify the Serialization Mode to Unidirectional which adds the attributes to your classes automatically.

I'm a firm believer in having Data Contracts that are as slim as possible to have the best performance over the wire. So if you have a WCF Service that will return just one data aspect of a full customer record from a complex database record, then only having that subset in a separate data contract will be better performing than just letting the entire customer record be serialized and transported over the wire.

T4MVC for ASP.NET MVC2

This T4 tool really provides a lot of very nice strongly typed capabilities in MVC related code. Check it out at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC