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Getting started with the ASP.NET MVC framework (excerpt from ASP.NET MVC in Action)
From: Jeffrey Palermo (.com) - 8/24/2008
(excerpt from ASP.NET MVC in Action ). Depending on how long you’ve been building web applications on the Microsoft platform, you’ll relate to some or all of the following pain. In the 1990’s, developers built interactive websites using executable programs that ran on a server. These programs (CGI was a common technology at the time) accepted a web request and were responsible for creating an Html response. Templating was ad-hoc, and the programs were difficult to write, debug and test. In the late 1990’s, Microsoft, after a brief stint with Htx templates and Idc connectors, introduced Active Server Pages, or ASP. Active Server Pages brought templating to web applications. The server page was an Html document with dynamic script mixed in. While this was a big step forward from the alternatives, the world soon saw massive server pages with code indecipherable from the markup. In early 2002, along came ASP.NET. ASP.NET was a complete shift for ASP developers because it moved all server page code into a class file and replaced the Html markup with dynamic server controls in an Xml syntax. While performance increased, and the debugging experience improved, new problems arose. The server-side postback event lifecycle caused newsgroups to explode with activity as developer searched for the magic event in which to add those two simple lines of code. Viewstate, while good in theory, broke down as the application scaled with complexity. Simple pages broke 100KB in size, most of which was the Viewstate. Perhaps the greatest sin of the ASP.NET framework was the tight coupling to everything in the System.Web namespace. There was no hope of unit testing any code in the code-behind file, and today we see Page_Load methods that take several trees to print. The ASP.NET MVC Framework has been introduced to simplify the complex parts of Web Forms while retaining the power and flexibility of ASP.NET. Controlling code is kept in a class separated from hard dependencies, and server page
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