Just when i was thinking about what should my first blog be about,
i saw Scott Hanselman ’s blog entry about the preview of upcoming MVC framework from Microsoft in the alt.net conference.

Scott Hanselman shared the video links for people like me who couldn’t attend the conference. Fantastic job Scott. [Direct Links to videos: ScottGu's MVC and ScottHansleman's DLR and MVC ]

My thoughts after seeing the presentation:

-> Its a SIGN OF GOOD THINGS to come in the .net world.
-> Red Green Refactor (Test Code Refactor cycle)
-> DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
-> Extension Points – programming to an interface and not to an implementation, having a base class and then override the virtual functions makes design and testability a little messy if not difficult.
-> Dependency injection using controller factories or by just plugging in your favourite DI container (picocontainer/spring etc..).
-> Stressing on Separation of Concerns and Testability
-> Leveraging lambdas as data
-> Using type inference for anonymous types (for Viewdata’s)
-> and yeah…MS talking about total control over the html thats being spit out (funny after what asp.net 2.0 has done to us)
-> When you have a huge solution with various projects, just use the uri router to look into the appropriate namespace (for the default page) rather than moving the pages to the default location.
-> not (just) showcasing the scaffolding/drag-and-drop stuff to the audience which was the norm in any other MS presentation . Though i guess in this case it was more to do with the audience (alt.net devs)
-> Though its not surprising to see the way MS is responding to the developments on the Open source front especially after the IronPython and IronRuby projects, its commendable that they are designing in a way which would encourage people to write better code by following TDD and hence in that process providing hook up points for the open source projects.
-> I think the impact of MS understanding the best practices prevalent in the agile world (aka pragmatic programmers world) and influencing other devs to go that way is a HUGE step in the right direction.
There are lots of people who just blindly follow what MS recommends and it would at times it would take an enterprise like MS to inculcate these practices rather than the greats like Kent Beck /Ward Cunningham .
But i’m sure Kent Beck /Ward Cunningham wouldn’t mind how the best practices put forth by them are spread. For them, Its more important that people in MS have taken note of these things and are following them and hence now their teachings would now be spread by the very people who can do the selling the best way.
(read as: sales people from MS at the golf course okay..okay..i know that these people can hack the actual practices, but its atleast better to have these guys on our side and then just fight for doing them the right way rather than fighting out the big philosophically diff way of development.)
-> MS opening up a lot more and not just taking good things from other languages/frameworks (ML and Haskell) but also thinking about supporting other open source projects like xUnit/xMock
-> Making the source code (except the asp.net framework) available to the community.

As i mentioned earlier, Scott did a fantastic job by providing the videos for people like me who couldn’t attend alt.net conf. But i couldn’t stop laughing when one of the commentators in Scott Hanselman ’s blog mentioned that the video was more like a blair witch project , though Scott Hanselman ’s Tv in Tv type presentation about the Dlr and MVC was damn good. I guess as others have commented about it..its the way to go for the future presentations.

And yeah…there’s a take away for other techies from MS too. ScottGu ROCKS!! So just go ScottGu ’s way…!!

hm…Just waiting for the bits to be available…