ASP.NET MVC for Live Applications
ASP.NET MVC has got big attention in the community and lot of people are looking to develop production ready applications with ASP.NET MVC. When can we start production ready applications with ASP.NET MVC? Since ASP.NET MVC Beta version is available, I think this is time to start live application with ASP.NET MVC. There is already lot of live applications build with ASP.NET MVC. Stackoverflow is really a killer web application build with ASP.NET MVC. If you are an Architect, this is the right time to develop infrastructure frameworks for ASP.NET MVC. The RTM version will be in Q4 2008 or Q1 2009. I hope that the RTM version will be release on this December. The changes from Beta to RTM version will be very minimum and the Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. Scott Guthrie wrote in his bog post ASP.NET MVC Beta Released “Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product”.
I believe that breaking changes and new features will be available after the release of V1. When I asked about the SubController infrastructure, Scott Guthrie replied that “The team currently has that penciled in for the release immediately following V1. The reason for not having it in V1 are: 1) there are a couple of approaches that could be used for it, and we want to spend a little more time investigating and exploring them (and not bake something prematurely into V1), and 2) there is a subcontroller implementation currently in the MVCContrib project that be used with the V1 release. I'd recommend looking at using that one if you need a subcontroller pattern, and then we'll bake one into the core binary once we feel confident on a final design”.
Our Development Attitude
ASP.NET MVC is a great technology and you can build powerful and highly maintainable web applications with ASP.NET MVC. But please keep in mind that you can build good and bad applications with same technology. So our attitude and development approaches are very important for building great software and the most important things is that we should have a good architecture for good software. I strongly believe that the .Net developer community should be more focus on object oriented principles and practices. I believe that the ALT.NET movement is a good sign and the ALT.NET Criterion is good for building better software. The ASP.NET MVC technology is based on a loosely coupled architecture and the framework is highly testable so that it enables to build great software. When we build applications with ASP.NET MVC, we should focus on object-oriented principles and practices and take this time to change our attitude towards object-oriented way. In the past, applications have been data-centric and this has been gradually changing to object-oriented way. I would like to suggest using an ORM for data persistence, Persistence Ignorance (PI) objects for domain layer, Repository pattern, Inversion of Control (IoC) container for dependency injection (DI) along with your ASP.NET MVC application. And I believe that Test Driven Development (TDD) gives you lot of values to your application development process.
Learning Resources to start applications
Stephen Walther’s blog post A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 contains lot of links that provides to learn and develop applications with ASP.NET MVC. For validations, Emad Ibrahim’s blog post Client & Server Side Validation in ASP.NET MVC is an excellent one. For dependency injection, my blog post ASP.NET MVC Tip: Dependency Injection with StructureMap provides step by step instructions to apply dependency injection into an ASP.NET MVC application using Structuremap. My blog post ASP.NET MVC Tip: Ajax and Validations using jQuery demonstrates how we can use jQuery for Ajax and validation as well as demonstrating partial rendering using user control. Steve Sanderson's ( Author of Apress' ASP.NET MVC Book) Blog is damn worth to read. And I strongly recommend to visit Rob Conery’s blog for his storefront series. He has been building an entire ecommerce application with ASP.NET MVC