ASP.NET MVC: The front-to-back advantage

In my current gig, I was surprised to find when I started that there were front-end and back-end developers. The front-side guys are mostly HTML, CSS and Javascript (actually, mostly jQuery) folks, while the back-end folks do all of the wiring up and heavy lifting on the server type stuff. Most of the places I've worked had developers touching everything, and if anyone was generating HTML, it was designers.

Then the big shocker came when one of the guys who was primarily front-end started messing around with the MVC framework. He already knew enough C# to be dangerous, but I was thrilled with his approach. He used MVC enough to get the various pages, er, views to show up correctly, and he was quickly cranking stuff out that any of the back-end guys could easily pick up.

I'm not sure why I didn't see it sooner, but in a shop where you have these divided responsiblities, the classic seperation of concerns translates well into real life! And probably the best part of it all is that it gets everyone excited about the framework, whlie leaving the client-side guys ready to do everything they know best, without getting in the way. It's a long way from messing with Web forms for them.

It's certainly going to be easy to do things incredibly wrong with MVC in terms of where you put code, but with a little coaching and a strong desire to push TDD, I can see a lot of potential for a new level of quality out of my team, even if some of them are a little green. I'm looking forward to the final release of MVC.