ASP.NET MVC - Thoughts and advices

It's almost one year ago when I got into web development with ASP.NET MVC. We prototyped with the betas, started using the release candidate to develop a new release of a product early 2009 and switched to final 1.0 when it was released. We went for MVC instead of web forms because we liked the simplicity of the web mvc concept. We also wanted increased testability of our code.

We never regretted our decision. Here are some thoughts, advices, pros and cons about ASP.NET MVC 1.0 after using it on a day by day basis for almost one year:

• The mvc pattern and the web is really a good duo. I was fascinated when I saw how Rails implemented the pattern with concepts like actions, filters and routes. Fortunately Microsoft didn't reinvent the wheel and implemented most of these proven concepts in ASP.NET MVC.
• ASP.NET MVC is a presentation layer framework for the web. It's not an application framework like RAILS. There is nothing like ActiveRecord, migrations or test fixtures in the framework. The positive thing is that you can choose whatever technologies you want to add. The negative thing is that you waste time in debates while choosing these technologies.
• ASP.NET MVC is not a very opinionated piece of software. It provides the hooks to add conventions and functionality, but doesn’t provide much in the way of structure itself. I couldn't find any advices or guidelines from Microsoft. More opinions are available from the guys from CodeBetter or in the Book ASP.NET MVC in Action
• Model binders and action filters are very helpful to keep controller actions clean. Use these guidelines for deciding when to use them:

Consider moving logic to an action filter when you start repeating yourself in your controller code.

Consider using built in model binding whenever you have to access the requests forms collection in a controller action.

Consider writing your own model binder if you can't bind your form data with the default model binder.


• Even thought you can do everything with HTML, CSS and JavaScript the cost of a nice and rich user interface in the browser are not to be sneezed at. In web forms you have a wide range of controls for almost every UI element. In ASP.NET MVC you have to build a lot of UI stuff (at least at time of this writing) by your own. The wonderful JQuery library and it's plugins provide basics like auto complete text boxes, tree views, calendars and popups. But you always have to write your own html helpers to integrate them into your views.
• The ASP.NET MVC team did a good job and built the framework with testability in mind. Calling controller actions from within a unit test and asserting the action's result is very easy - as long as you don't have real world code in your controller. Even if you do a good job in layering your application the presentation layer is the place where everything is put together. That means that you will mostly end up with many dependencies in your controllers and that's exactly the scenario where unit testing gets hard. Isolation frameworks like Typemock, Moq or Rhinomock can help you overcome these issues. But the use of these tools often lead to over specified tests.
• Lately we had to extend our product with an outlook addin with a reduced feature set in comparison of the main web client. We decided to implement the web services as RESTful services. ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has no built in RESTful web service support but with a little help from the REST For ASP.NET MVC SDK and the WCF REST Starter Kit it was very easy to build a web API with MVC.

In summary I can say developing web applications with ASP.NET MVC is fun. I'm looking forward for Version 2 which will ship with Visual Studio 2010.