ASP.NET MVC has reached RTM! I was kind of expecting Scott Guthrie to announce the final release, but instead it was only a small news item on the ASP.NET homepage!
It has been a long time in Beta and as such I have stayed away from it until the last couple of weeks. There are enough new products released from Microsoft to keep me busy without getting bogged down in beta’s!
So in the last couple of weeks I have been learning ASP.NET MVC after discovering that the final release was imminent and I have to admit that I am very impressed. The first and foremost difference would be that there is no longer the same postback lifecycle and no ViewState, which means pages are very fast (yay)! The level of control you have over the final HTML is akin to the old days of classic ASP or PHP, but still with all the .NET goodies to make life easier. After spending so long in Web Forms, it is quite strange (but a nice strange) to look at the HTML source and see plain, concise markup.
I’ve found the best learning source to be the tutorials provided on the official ASP.NET MVC site and also the first chapter of the new Wrox book which is available for free from Scott Guthrie. As with everything there are no shortcuts and there is a lot to learn, but if you are comfortable with the web platform in general, then the learning curve is not that steep at all.
To learn something well you need to create a sample project. I always create a simple task management tool so that I get a nice comparison between technologies. What I found was that to AJAX-enable the site was a lot more straight forward than using the Web Forms approach – the end result was cleaner and the whole MVC approach leans itself totally to the AJAX approach.
All in all, well worth learning.
