ASP.NET MVC, front-to-back advantage revisited
A couple of month ago, I wrote a post about the surprising advantage of MVC as an enabling technology for front end folks. The more I work with it, the more I feel that it's the key advantage to using MVC. Given my rants on why I think the user experience is so important, you can understand why I'm so excited by this.
The shift in thinking to making more UX magic on the client end does throw us back into the world of Javascript, which is at least a little unfortunate since the debugging tools aren't nearly as good as the back end, but with jQuery and countless plugins easing the pain, I continue to be amazed at how quickly you can turn out really nice experiences. And even more surprising is that it doesn't require all kinds of drag-and-drop tools. You really get into the weeds with actual code, but without a ton of complexity.
What am I rambling about exactly? Your client code is often a couple of lines of code to make a JSON call or activate graphical notifiers, while your server code is often little more than a simple controller action. Even in the best encapsulation of script and rendering code in standard Web controls for Webforms, it's never that clean.
The question in my mind now is, what happens when ASP.NET v4 is out? With a much higher degree of rendering control, the "cleanliness" issues may be largely addressed when it comes to writing the client code. Will it still be as compelling?
I'm curious to hear stories from developers on how MVC is making their lives easier (or harder).