Austin's Microsoft WebMatrix to ASP.NET MVC Web Camp

Last Monday Scott Hanselmann and Jonathan Carter presented a seminar some new Microsoft technologies to a packed, standing-room-only crowd.
I love Scott's podcasting so I was eager to hear him in person and I was not disappointed. Although the technical details were sometimes dry, Scott's personality and the banter with Jonathan were fun. Scott has the rare ability to be very technical and yet sociable.

Especially humorous were the Windows7 popups declaring, "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting."
My jumbled notes:

1. The emerging standard with jQuery is to present metadata about an xml element as attributes prepending "data-" so jQuery can easily pluck it off the element with the "data" function.
   

   ... data-xvalue="30.0" ... $(taget.data('xvalue')
   

2. Modernizr is a package to help simplify writing javascript for older browsers.
   
3. preface fiddler's url with "ipv4.fiddler" to use in a browser.
   
4. elmah is a usefullogging framework supported by nuget. See nuget.org.
   
5. VS2010 now has a Package Manager
   
6. PM>Install-Package AddMVC3ToWebForms
   
7. WebActivator
   
8. PackageMangerConsole has MVC Scaffolding
   
9. PM>Scaffold Controller Post
   
10. Linq to SQL is now complete. No new features planned. The future is Entity Framework.
    
11. Web Platform INstaller
    
12. Razor is a minimalist templating framework. Viewbag is dynamic.
    

Scott and Jonathon made the day fun, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "with all this new technology the .Net community is now only five years behind those cool Ruby-on-Rails kids."

Microsoft's MVC Framework

I'm very excited about Scott Gutherie's new ModelViewController framework. It's very similiar to RubyOnRails, Grails, and Monorails where the three logical concerns of Model, View, and Controller are separated. This separation makes Test Driven Development much easier. In the current ASP.NET world the ModelViewPresenter pattern is used to separate these concerns, but it's a pain.
Cool Features of Microsoft MVP:

1. xUnit friendly
   
2. Built-in mock objects
   
3. Very pluggable for Dependency Injection and other major components
   
4. Friendly REST-like URL generation
   
5. Separate directories for Model, View, Controller just like RoR
   

Scott's original blog entry is here.
A video from the Alt.Net conference in Silverlight is here and if you can't get Silverlight audio, the wmv file is currently here.
(Yeah, I know you're not suppose to do the "click here" links, but some studies show that using them doubles the clickthru rate).

After the success of Java in the late 1990s, Microsoft did some serious research on the strengths and flaws of Java (one of my fiends was in a Microsoft sponsored focus group about Java). C# was the result - a slight improvement on Java. I'm encouraged that Scott and his team have researched many MVC frameworks and have learned from each.
The MVC framework should be here in a month or so and we can play with it inside VS2008.