Comme le précise ce billet http://dosimple.ch/articles/MVC-ASP.NET/ écrit le 2 mai 2006 et celui-ci écrit le 13 mars 2007, le framework ASP.NET n’incite pas particulièrement à la séparation stricte de type Modèle, Vue, Contrôleur. On a vu que Monorail, projet open source, implémente le modèle MVC. Microsoft emboite le pas avec un grand retard en introduisant ASP.NET MVC: voir le billet suivant: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx (« One of the things that many people have asked for over the years with ASP.NET is built-in support for developing web applications using a model-view-controller (MVC) based architecture. Last weekend at the Alt.NET conference in Austin I gave the first public demonstration of a new ASP.NET MVC framework that my team has been working on. You can watch a video of my presentation about it on Scott Hanselman’s blog here.
What is a Model View Controller (MVC) Framework?
MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application’s implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers.
- « Models » in a MVC based application are the components of the application that are responsible for maintaining state. Often this state is persisted inside a database (for example: we might have a Product class that is used to represent order data from the Products table inside SQL).
- « Views » in a MVC based application are the components responsible for displaying the application’s user interface. Typically this UI is created off of the model data (for example: we might create an Product « Edit » view that surfaces textboxes, dropdowns and checkboxes based on the current state of a Product object).
- « Controllers » in a MVC based application are the components responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI. In a MVC application the view is only about displaying information – it is the controller that handles and responds to user input and interaction.
One of the benefits of using a MVC methodology is that it helps enforce a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within an application. Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.
The MVC pattern can also help enable red/green test driven development (TDD) – where you implement automated unit tests, which define and verify the requirements of new code, first before you actually write the code itself.
A few quick details about the ASP.NET MVC Framework
I’ll be doing some in-depth tutorial posts about the new ASP.NET MVC framework in a few weeks once the bits are available for download (in the meantime the best way to learn more is to watch the video of my Alt.net presentation).
A few quick details to share in the meantime about the ASP.NET MVC framework:
- It enables clean separation of concerns, testability, and TDD by default. All core contracts within the MVC framework are interface based and easily mockable (it includes interface based IHttpRequest/IHttpResponse intrinsics). You can unit test the application without having to run the Controllers within an ASP.NET process (making unit testing fast). You can use any unit testing framework you want to-do this testing (including NUnit, MBUnit, MS Test, etc).
- It is highly extensible and pluggable. Everything in the MVC framework is designed so that it can be easily replaced/customized (for example: you can optionally plug-in your own view engine, routing policy, parameter serialization, etc). It also supports using existing dependency injection and IOC container models (Windsor, Spring.Net, NHibernate, etc).
- It includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs. URLs do not need to have extensions within them, and are designed to easily support SEO and REST-friendly naming patterns. For example, I could easily map the /products/edit/4 URL to the « Edit » action of the ProductsController class in my project above, or map the /Blogs/scottgu/10-10-2007/SomeTopic/ URL to a « DisplayPost » action of a BlogEngineController class.
- The MVC framework supports using the existing ASP.NET .ASPX, .ASCX, and .Master markup files as « view templates » (meaning you can easily use existing ASP.NET features like nested master pages, <%= %> snippets, declarative server controls, templates, data-binding, localization, etc). It does not, however, use the existing post-back model for interactions back to the server. Instead, you’ll route all end-user interactions to a Controller class instead – which helps ensure clean separation of concerns and testability (it also means no viewstate or page lifecycle with MVC based views).
- The ASP.NET MVC framework fully supports existing ASP.NET features like forms/windows authentication, URL authorization, membership/roles, output and data caching, session/profile state management, health monitoring, configuration system, the provider architecture, etc. »)
A voir:
- https://pvergain.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/critique-de-larchitecture-aspnet/ (« Le problème avec ASP. Net est qu’il n’y a qu’un objet qui traite les demandes http, c’est l’objet PAGE. C’est lui qui a le contrôle de tout, et donc il mélange le code dit de «contrôle», et le code qui pilote la «visualisation» des éléments en html. Et bien souvent, on mélange aussi le code qui pilote le «Modèle» c’est à dire l’obtention des données directement depuis la base de données avec Ado.Net (c’est ce qu’on obtient lorsqu’on fait du WYSIWYG dans Visual Studio en choisissant les Sql Data Source et les glissant-déposant sur l’ihm). Cet anti-modèle (ou anti–pattern) a été souvent pointé du doigt par les architectes et développeurs, car en plus de faire produire du code spaghetti (bien que orienté objet), il rend impossible les tests systématisés (automatisés).« )
- http://dosimple.ch/articles/MVC-ASP.NET/ (« Dans le framework ASP.NET la vue est un fichier HTML agrémenté de balises ASP. Le contrôleur et le modèle sont en général mélangés dans un objet qui dérive de la classe
System.Web.UI.Page. »)
- http://www.castleproject.org/monorail/index.html (« MonoRail is a MVC Web Framework inspired by Action Pack. MonoRail differs from the standard WebForms way of development as it enforces separation of concerns; controllers just handle application flow, models represent the data, and the view is just concerned about presentation logic. Consequently, you write less code and end up with a more maintainable application. Although the project name is MonoRail, we do not have any affiliation with the Mono project. MonoRail runs on Microsoft .Net 1.1, 2.0 and Mono.« )
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET_MVC_Framework (« ASP.NET MVC Framework is a Model-view-controller framework which Microsoft is adding to ASP.NET. It allows an application to be built as a composition of three roles: Model, View and Controller. A Model represents the state of a particular aspect in the application. Frequently, a model maps to a database table, with the entries in the table representing the state of the table. A Controller handles interactions and updates the model to reflect a change in state of the application. A View ASP.NET MVC Framework couples the models, views and controllers using interface-based contracts, thereby allowing each component to be easily tested independently. The view engine in the MVC framework uses regular
.aspx pages to design the layout of the UI pages onto which the data is composed; however any interactions are routed to the controllers rather than using the postback mechanism. Views can be mapped to REST-friendly URLs. ASP.NET MVC Framework has been launched as a Community Technology Preview on December 10, 2007 extracts necessary information from a model and renders a UI to display that.. »)
- http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScottHaScreencastFromALTNETConference.aspx ( » I attended the ALT.NET Conference last weekend in Austin, TX. I personally find the name « Alt » as in « Alternative » too polarizing and prefer terms like « Pragmatic.NET » or « Agile.NET. » At the conference I suggested, partially in jest, that we call it « NIH.NET » as in « Not Invented Here.NET. » 😉 Ultimately this is a group that believes in:
- Continuous Learning
- Being Open to Open Source Solutions
- Challenging the Status Quo
- Good Software Practices
- DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
- Common Sense when possible.
ScottGu gave an hour long presentation on the upcoming MVC Framework and I took some guerilla video. ScottGu’s presentation is here in Silverlight and it’s about 60 minutes long. Considering it’s so long, the video squished nicely. This was the first time the MVC Framework was shown publicly. Note that this was a Prototype, not the Production code and both ScottGu and I make that point a number of times to drive home that it’s early. Some of the code was written on a plane, just to give you an idea. After The Gu did his piece on the MVC Framework, I showed some prototype hacking that I’d done over the previous few days along with some work Phil Haack did. My presentation is here as Silverlight and it’s about 30 minutes long. I showed the Model View Controller with Controllers in IronPython and an IronPython view using a WebFormViewEngine. Then I talked about the possibilities of alternate ViewEngines and showed Phil Haack’s prototype RubyViewEngine. »)
- http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx ( » ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1) I’m going to use a simple e-commerce store application to help illustrate how the ASP.NET MVC Framework works. For today’s post I’ll be implementing a product listing/browsing scenario in it. Specifically, we are going to build a store-front that enables end-users to browse a list of product categories when they visit the /Products/Categories URL on the site…>>Since it adds a testing project, does this require Team System? No – the good news is that Test Projects with VS 2008 are now supported with the VS 2008 Professional edition – and no longer require team system. You will also be able to use the VS Express and Standard edition products as well, and then use NUnit, MBUnit or some other testing framework with them (we’ll ship project templates for these as well…>> 2. Is it also possible to have this URL mapped: /Products/Beverages/3 instead of /Products/Beverages?page=3 or does it _need_ the parameter name? Yes – this is totally supported. Just set a route rule for /Products/Beverages with the format /Products/<Category>/<Page> – they’ll then get passed in as arguments to the action method:public List(string category, int? page) {}>>Also, some ideas and general remarks: 1. I’d love to see more helper methods for use in the views, I like how Ruby on Rails has many shortcuts for creating forms and formfields etc. Yes – we’ll have a rich library of helper methods for the views. They’ll include helpers to create all the standard forms, formfields and more.
>>2. Migrations! Not a part of MVC but from my experience with Ruby on Rails I would love to see support for this somewhere, anywhere! It would fit perfectly with the more agile way of developing that is possible with ASP.NET MVC. Rob Conery is building .NET Migrations support as part of the SubSonic project, and recently joined Microsoft. You’ll be able to use this with ASP.NET MVC…
>>I’m also very keen to get my hands on the CTP. Scott, you mention, using Inversion of Control containers with the MVC framework. I’d be very interested in seeing a blog post on this subject. Also, will there be a sample application (with tests and IoC) available alonside the CTP? We have a IControllerFactory extensiblity point that owns creating Controller instances. You can use this with a IOC container to customize any Controller instance prior to it being called by the MVC framework. We’ll be posting samples of how to use this with ObjectBuilder and Windsor with the first CTP I believe…
>> Very cool! One thing I’d like to see guidance on is developing MVC apps with multiple UIs. You say here that it’s best to put your models and controllers in the web app, but say we want a Winforms, WPF, Silverlight, and Web UI all doing similar things. Or a Mobile Web UI and Desktop Web UI… Would these still each need their own Models and Controllers, or does it make sense to have one library that they all share? If so, how is that supported? I’m still new to MVC, so if I’m missing something conceptually here, tell me! That is a good question, and one we’ll need to provide more guidance on in the future. In general it is often hard to share the same controller across both client and web UI, since the way you do data access and the stateful/stateless boundaries end up being very different. It is possible – but some guidance here would ceretainly be useful. My team should hopefully be coming out with this in the future…
>>I really appreciate this material. Do you support the MVC pattern over the MVP pattern? Or are there just better scenarios for using each? The above approach I showed uses a MVC based pattern – where the Controller and the View tend to be more separate and more loosly coupled. In a MVP pattern you typically drive the UI via interfaces. This works well with a controls model, and makes a lot of sense with both WinForms and WebForms where you are using a postback model. Both MVC and MVP are perfectly fine approaches to use. We are coming out with the MVC approach for ASP.NET partly because we’ve seen more demand for it recently for web scenarios…
>> When can we expect a similar chapter with SubSonic as the DAL and scaffolding provider? (see http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2007/11subsonic-will-be-toolset-for-microsofts.html I’ll be covering scaffolding in a future blog post. LINQ to SQL scaffolding is built-in with ASP.NET MVC and doesn’t require SubSonic. SubSonic will also obviously be adding new ASP.NET MVC features as well.
>> My applications in .NET works with « 3 layers » pattern (business logic and data access in your own dll). How can i use this wonderfull MVC with my Models (data access) and Controllers (B.Logic)?? Because if i’m not reuse this, i’ve repeat code in every layer; then this MVC is not DRY (don’t repeat yourself) and the community don’t accept. There is no need to put your business and data logic in the same assembly as your controllers. You can split them up across multiple class library projects if you prefer
>> Does this mean that with MVC, we no longer use LinqDatasource in the View section? While the LinqDataSource control will technically work in MVC Views, if you are using a MVC model you wouldn’t want to place it there. Instead you want to perform all of your data and application logic in the Controller layer – and then pass the needed data to the view.
>> Perhaps I missed it somehow, but can you explain on which version of asp.net will this ctp run? The MVC framework builds on top of .NET 3.5
>> Scott, this is amazing timing! The URL mapping features inherit in an MVC application are PERFECT for the upgrade to ASP.NET 3.5 I’m making to my spelldamage.com site. Hosting question, will hosts simply need to support the ASP.NET 3.5 framework to allow us to run ASP.NET MVC applications? Your hoster will need to support .NET 3.5 for the MVC support.
>> Is’nt the MVC framework, in fact the Controller, implementation of the Front Controller pattern? Yes – the ASP.NET MVC framework uses a front-controller pattern. »)
- http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/03/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-2-url-routing.aspx (« Last month I blogged the first in a series of posts I’m going to write that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing scenario. It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality. In today’s blog post I’m going to drill deeper into the routing architecture of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and discuss some of the cool ways you can use it for more advanced scenarios in your application… What does the ASP.NET MVC URL Routing System do? The ASP.NET MVC framework includes a flexible URL routing system that enables you to define URL mapping rules within your applications. The routing system has two main purposes:
- Map incoming URLs to the application and route them so that the right Controller and Action method executes to process them
- Construct outgoing URLs that can be used to call back to Controllers/Actions (for example: form posts, <a href= » »> links, and AJAX calls)
Having the ability to use URL mapping rules to handle both incoming and outgoing URL scenarios adds a lot of flexibility to application code. It means that if we want to later change the URL structure of our application (for example: rename /Products to /Catalog), we could do so by modifying one set of mapping rules at the application level – and not require changing any code within our Controllers or View templates.
>> BTW, can you explain in short about the Active Record Type support in our MVC.
.NET 3.5 has LINQ to SQL built-in – which is a great ORM. LINQ to Entities will also be built-into .NET 3.5 in the future (it also ships with the MVC setup). The MVC framework doesn’t require LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities as the data model – it also works with NHibernate, LLBLGen, SubSonic, DataSets, DataReaders, and/or any other data model with .NET. We will, though, provide out of the box scaffolding support for LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities that delivers nice integration with the MVC support.
>> Question : What is this MockHttpContext in the UnitTest class? I mean, i can guess what it is .. but is it new in .NET 3.5 or the MVC framework? The MockHttpContext is an example mock object. It isn’t currently built-in with the MVC framework (with the first preview you’d need to create this yourself). I’m hoping that before the MVC framework ships, though, that there are a built-in set of mock objects and test helpers that you can use out of the box (without having to mock them yourself). Note that all core contracts and types with the MVC framework are mockable (non-sealed and interfaces). So you can also use any existing Mock framework to test it (RhinoMocks, TypeMock, etc).
>> 1) Is it possible to use routes with a file extension if I don’t want to enable wildcard script mappings? For example, /Products/List/Beverages.rails or /Products/Detail/34.rails ? Yes – this is fully supported. We recommend changing your route rule to /[controller].mvc/[action]/[id]. When you install the ASP.NET MVC Framework we automatically register this .mvc extension – although you are free to use any other one you want.
>> Hypothetically, do you think it would be possible to customise the route creation process so that route data could be gathered from attributes on actions? We don’t currently support this built-in, but hypothetically you could load all the controllers at app-startup and use reflection on them to calculate the route rules. This would enable the scenario you are after.
>> Is it possible to use IronRuby as the coding language to target the MVC framework?? Yes – we’ll support both IronRuby and IronPython with the ASP.NET MVC Framework.
>> I am liking this more and more. I can see how the routing configuration code in global.asax.cs could become quite large. In my application, I can see dozens, maybe hundreds of unique routing rules. Is there any way this configuration can be put in a file somewhere? That file would be read on Application start. Seems like that would make deployment of routing changes easier, too. We don’t currently have a pre-built file format for reading in mapping rules. But it should be relatively easy to build (you could even use LINQ to XML to read in and construct the rules).
>> Just out of curiosity where in the HttpApplication cycle are the routing rules evaluated and are they exposed in any way to the rest of the HttpApplication cycle? My current security system grants permissions at what would become the controller-action level so if the route determination is made early enough I’d really like to drive my authorization off of it.
The routing rules are resolved after the OnPostMapRequestRequestHandler event. This means that it will happen *after* your authorization rules evaluate. The good news is that this means you should be able to re-use your existing security system as-is.
>> Will there be any way to use an XML document to create the routing rules outside of the Global.asax code? Yep – this scenario will be supported.
>> I noticed that in Django, you have to repeat yourself kind of often when you have a deep nested hierarchy of pages. Your search & search-results pages seem to be continuing that trend. I’m sure I could come up with some hierarchical data structure which can be serialized into Route objects, but is the ASP.NET team planning anything along those lines that would come stock?
With our first preview the Route type is not extensible (you can’t subclass it) – which means you sometimes need to register multiple routes for a series of things. For the next preview we are looking at enabling Route to be sub-classed – in which case you could easily encapsulate multiple URL mappings into a single registration.
>> Have you thought about being able to define a regular expression for url matching and using backreferences or named captures as the tokenized url? I think this would allow for much more flexibility while keeping the list of routing rules down to a minimum.
Yes – this is something we are looking at. The challange with regular expressions is that only a subset of people really understand them (and importantly – understand how to optimize them). But I agree that having this as an option would be super flexible.
>> I must say that i am still worried about having to leave all the knowledge that we ave until now with webforms and start a new technology and still think that we would need some kind of a bridge to close the gap between today solution of webforms and tomorrow solution of MVC. Although the way you structure application flow will be different, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the amount of knowledge overlap that exists. Authentication, Authorization, Caching, Configuration, Compilation, Session State, Profile Management, Health Monitoring, Administration, Deployment, and many, many other things are exactly the same. MVC views are also .aspx pages (that use .ascx user controls and .master files). So the concept re-use is quite heavy there as well. »)
- http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/06/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-3-passing-viewdata-from-controllers-to-views.aspx (« The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on. The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear separation of concerns, and make it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing site. It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality. The second post in this series drilled deep into the URL routing architecture of the ASP.NET MVC framework, and discussed both how it worked as well as how you can handle more advanced URL routing scenarios with it. In today’s blog post I’m going to discuss how Controllers interact with Views, and specifically cover ways you can pass data from a Controller to a View in order to render a response back to a client. In Part 1 of this series, we created an e-commerce site that implemented basic product listing/browsing support. We implemented this site using the ASP.NET MVC Framework, which led us to naturally structure the code into distinct controller, model and view components. When a browser sends a HTTP request to our web site, the ASP.NET MVC Framework will use its URL routing engine to map the incoming request to an action method on a controller class to process it. Controllers in a MVC based application are responsible for processing incoming requests, handling user input and interactions, and executing application logic based on them (retrieving and updating model data stored in a database, etc). When it comes time to render an HTML response back to the client, controllers typically work with « view » components – which are implemented as separate classes/templates from the controllers, and are intended to be focused entirely on encapsulating presentation logic. Views should not contain any application logic or database retrieval code, instead all application/data logic should only be handled by the controller class. The motivation behind this partitioning is to help enforce a clear separation of your application/data logic from your UI generation code. This makes it easier to unit test your application/data logic in isolation from your UI rendering logic.Views should only render their output using the view-specific data passed to it by the Controller class. In the ASP.NET MVC Framework we call this view-specific data « ViewData ». The rest of this blog post is going to cover some of the different approaches you can use to pass this « ViewData » from the Controller to the View to render.
>> One question Scott: Let say i’m jumpng on MS MVC bandwagon, do i have to abandon asp.net Page Life cycle godddies, should i set up my mind to different approach. When you use the ASP.NET MVC approach you’ll want to have all post in your site go to your Controller. This helps ensure that the application can be easily tested and preserves the separation of concerns. This is different from using ASP.NET server controls which postback to themselves (which is very powerful too – but means that it can sometimes be slightly harder to test). What doesn’t change is that all of other ASP.NET pieces (forms authentication, role management, session state, caching, profiles, configuration, compilation, httprequest/response, health monitoring, etc, etc) works with both web forms based pages and MVC based pages. MVC UI are also built with .aspx, .master, and .ascx files – so there is a high level of skill re-use there as well.
>> Some asp.net controls require <form runat=server>. If we use a asp:dropdownlist for example, we have to place in the asp:form. And this means viewstate comes back! Is there any way to get rid of hidden form fields? Or you suggest that we do must use classic HTML controls ? I’ll cover this more in my next blog in this series. We have helpers that can automate generating things like dropdownlists, etc. Think of them as controls for MVC. These don’t use viewstate and give you a little more control over the output of your HTML.
>> It would be nice if you can just compare a bit our MVC with ROR. Within ROR, we can create tables, Columns and Rows with Ruby, without using a single line of SQL, and all its done through ActiveRecord. In short all CRUD advantages.
>> SubSonic is almost in this line. Can you explain more in this line or how SubSonic can be used to take ActiveRecord Type advantages.
RoR is made up of several components.
« Action Controller » is the name of the MVC framework that Rails uses. That is the closest analogy to the ASP.NET MVC Framework – and at a high-level the ASP.NET MVC framework uses many of the same core concepts (URLs map to controller actions). The ASP.NET MVC Framework has a few additional features (like the ability to map incoming parameters directly to action method parameters). It is also more explicit about calling RenderView within the request.
« Active View » is the name of the View engine that Rails uses. This is analagous to the .aspx/.master/.ascx infrastructure ASP.NET has. Our view engine is IMO a little richer, and supports several additional features (declarative controls/components, templating, multiple regions for nested master pages, WYSIWYG designer, strongly typed ViewData access, pluggable storage provider, declarative localization, etc).
« Active Record » is the name of the ORM (object relational mapper) that RoR uses. This is analagous to an ORM in the .NET world – whether it is LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, LLBLGen, SubSonic, NHibernate, ActiveRecord (the .NET version), etc. All of these ORMs have ways to map rows and columns in a database to objects that a developer then manipulates and works against (and can save changes back). The LINQ to SQL ORM is built-in to .NET 3.5 today, and LINQ to Entities will be built-in with .NET 3.5 SP1.
I think from your follow-up question above you are referring specifically to the « migrations » feature in RoR – which allows you to define table schemas using code, and version the schemas forward/backward. There isn’t a built-in version of this in the core .NET Framework today – although the SubSonic project has recently released a version that allows you to-do this using .NET. You can find out more about it here: www.subsonicproject.com.
>> Superb, …but I still longing for the IOC integration (Spring.NET, Windsor, StructureMap)…maybe in the next post ? I am planning on posting about IOC and dependency injection in the future (the ASP.NET MVC framework fully supports it and can be used with Spring.NET, Windsor, StructureMap, etc). I have a few other more basic MVC tutorials I need to get out of the way first – but testing and dependency injection are on the list for the future.
>> Nice series, eagerly waiting to see AJAX approach in the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, so when shall we expext that.
We will have ASP.NET AJAX support with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. I’ll talk more about this in a future tutorial series post.
>> This is coming together nicely. I was just hoping you might explain why there are 3 different ways to pass the ViewData? Does each method offer something that the others don’t? If not, surely it would be best to choose one method and force all developers to follow the same practice? Conceptually there are two ways to pass viewdata – either as a dictionary, or as a strongly typed object. In general I recommend using the strongly typed dictionary approach – since this gives you better compilation checking, intellisense, and refactoring support. There are, however, some times when having a more latebound dictionary approach ends up being flexible for more dynamic scenarios« )
- http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/subsonic-will-be-toolset-for-microsofts.html (« Not the Entity Framework, not LINQ to SQL, but (gasp!!!) open-source SubSonic will deliver the default data abstraction and persistence layer and scaffolding for the forthcoming Model-View-Controller (MVC) add-on to ASP.NET 3.5. SubSonic’s creator, Rob Conery, will start work at Microsoft next Monday, November 12, 2007, to assist with integration chores and evangelize ASP.NET developers. I missed Rob’s October 26, 2007 Microsoft, SubSonic, and Me post, which announced that he was going to work for Shawn Burke, one of Scott Guthrie‘s direct reports in the Developer Division. »)
- http://blog.wekeroad.com/2007/10/26/microsoft-subsonic-and-me/ (« Rather than try and come up with some lame metaphors and trite pop-culture references, I’ve decided to use some advice from English 101 Professor:
“Whatever the hell you’re trying to say, just say it”
So I will: I’m going to work for Microsoft. I just signed the offer letter. I’ll be working with the ASP.NET guys on the new MVC platform as well as some other groovy things like Silverlight. I get to work “across the hall” from one of my very good friends – Phil Haack. I think it’s worth pointing out that SubSonic hasn’t been “bought”. Some might smell a conspiracy here, but I’ll leave that to the X-Files and Cap’n Crunch crowd to drum up all the evil reasons why the mothership has “beamed me up”. SubSonic will remain under the same MPL 1.1 license it always has, and will remain as completely Open Source as it always has – nothing will change at all. I’m just getting paid, essentially, to work on it 🙂...This is crucial to me. I decided to be direct with him and make sure we both understood these important points:
“I want to be sure I have complete creative control over SubSonic, and that you don’t censor my blog… is that cool?”
Shawn’s response is why I took the job:
“Well Duh…” (he added some more things that were a bit more eloquent than “duh” – but I don’t think I was listening).
I can make jokes about the UAC on my blog? And make up fictional Matrix converstations with ScottGu? Sign me up! I start on November 12th, right after DevConnections in Vegas (come on by if you’re out that way at the DNN Open Force« )
- http://www.subsonicproject.com/ (« A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt. SubSonic works up your DAL for you, throws in some much-needed utility functions, and generally speeds along your dev cycle. Why SubSonic ? Because you need to spend more time with your friends, family, dog, bird, cat… whatever. You work too much. Coding doesn’t need to be complicated and time-consuming. »)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development (« Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique consisting of short iterations where new test cases covering the desired improvement or new functionality are written first, then the production code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes. The availability of tests before actual development ensures rapid feedback after any change. Practitioners emphasize that test-driven development is a method of designing software, not merely a method of testing. Test-Driven Development began to receive publicity in the early twenty-first century as an aspect of Extreme Programming, but more recently is creating more general interest in its own right. Along with other techniques, the concept can also be applied to the improvement and removal of software defects from legacy code that was not developed in this way . »)
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- http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-4-handling-form-edit-and-post-scenarios.aspx
- (« ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on. The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear separation of concerns, and make it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing site. It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality. The second post drilled deep into the URL routing architecture of the ASP.NET MVC framework, and discussed both how it worked as well asthird post discussed how Controllers interact with Views, and specifically covered ways you can pass view data from a Controller to a View in order to render a response back to a client. In today’s blog post I’m going to discuss approaches you can use to handle form input and post scenarios using the MVC framework, as well as talk about some of the HTML Helper extension methods you can use with it to make data editing scenarios easier. Click here to download the source code for the completed application we are going to build below to explain these concepts… Our Data Model. We are going to use the SQL Server Northwind Sample Database to store our data. We’ll then use the LINQ to SQL object relational mapper (ORM) built-into .NET 3.5 to model the Product, Category, and Supplier objects that represent rows in our database tables. We’ll begin by right-clicking on our /Models sub-folder in our ASP.NET MVC project, and select « Add New Item » -> « LINQ to SQL Classes » to bring up the LINQ to SQL ORM designer and model our data objects…To learn more about LINQ and LINQ to SQL, please check out my LINQ to SQL series here… The HtmlHelper object (as well as the AjaxHelper object – which we’ll talk about in a later tutorial) have been specifically designed to be easily extended using « Extension Methods » – which is a new language feature of VB and C# in the VS 2008 release. What this means is that anyone can create their own custom helper methods for these how you can handle more advanced URL routing scenarios with it. The objects and share them for you to use. We’ll have dozens of built-in HTML and AJAX helper methods in future previews of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. In the first preview release only the « ActionLink » method is built-into System.Web.Extensions (the assembly where the core ASP.NET MVC framework is currently implemented). We do, though, also have a separate « MVCToolkit » download that you can add to your project to obtain dozens more helper methods that you can use with the first preview release.
- >> This is nice. But do you handle subcomponents? subviews? Is view reuse possible inside other view? This is very important for even for modest sized applications? How would you handle posts correcly inside of subviews 😉 ?The first public MVC preview doesn’t have the concept of SubControllers yet (where you can attach them for regions of a larger view). That is something we have planned for to tackle soon though.
>> However, liviu raises good questions about Sub-Controllers, Composite Views and AJAX scenarios. How Will the MVC framework address the complex wiring of different parts of a page to different controllers for async updates?? My brain hurts thinking about it, yet I have implement these portal pages all the time cos our customers demand it. The first ASP.NET MVC Preview allows you to call RenderView (for example: RenderView(« Edit »)) and have it apply to either a .aspx viewpage or a .ascx viewusercontrol. This ends up being really useful for scenarios where you are doing AJAX callbacks and want to refresh a portion of a page. These callbacks could either be to the same Controller that rendered the origional page, or to another Controller in the project. We don’t have all the AJAX helper methods yet for this – but you could roll them yourself today. We’ll obviously be releasing an update that does include them in the future.
- >> Can you provide an example of how we might use a server side control to generate the drop down list or a textbox (a la WebForms) along with the pro’s and con’s of each approach? Personally, I do not like the old ASP <%= … %> syntax; but if there is a good reason to use it then I am willing to change that opinion. The main reason I showed the <% %> syntax in this post was that we don’t have the server-side MVC control equivalents available yet for this dropdown and text scenario. That is on our roadmap to-do though – at which point you don’t need to necessarily use the <% %> syntax. In general what we’ve found is that some developers hate the <% %> syntax, while others prefer it (and feel that controls get in the way). We want to make both sets of developers happy, and will have options for both. 🙂
- >> Great work on the MVC model, it is a clean and intuitive model that appears to scale well. My only recommendation is that your actions (verbs) appear after the ids (nouns), e.g. [Controller]/[Id]/[Action]/ That would keep the architecture noun focused, opposed to verb focused. With this approach you can easily build an administrative interface on a public read-only site by adding verbs such as /edit/ or /delete/ at the end of your URL. A simple security rule can be added to the Controller that says ignore all Verbs after a noun, such as category or product, if user is not part of an administrative group. Thanks for the suggestion Josh. You can do this today by creating your own custom route registration. In the next preview I believe Route will be extensible so that you could also create a single resource route that supports these semantics.>> I was wondering if we could get an idea of the official « roadmap » for asp.net mvc? Specifically, I’d like to know what features the team plans to release on what dates … ultimately, when this thing will RTM. As I’ll be evaluating mvc and monorail for an upcoming app, this kind of information would really be helpful in determining which direction to go. We don’t have a formally published roadmap just yet – we will hopefully publish one early next year though.« )
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET_AJAX (« ASP.NET AJAX, formerly code-named Atlas, is a set of extensions to ASP.NET developed by Microsoft for implementing Ajax functionality. Including both client-side and server-side components, ASP.NET AJAX allows the developer to create web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 (and to a limited extent in other environments) which can update data on the web page without a complete reload of the page. The key technology which enables this functionality is the XMLHttpRequest object, along with Javascript and DHTML. ASP.NET AJAX was released as a standalone extension to ASP.NET in January 2007 after a lengthy period of beta-testing. It was subsequently included with version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, which was released alongside Visual Studio 2008 in November 2007.« )
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