I have been trying to find some time here for quite some time to take a good look into this new product that is being previewed by Microsoft.  Well this morning I'm getting a chance to work with it.  In the breif readings that I have done on this product I am greatly impressed!  The product even quite new in it's conception is quite useful! I can see that many of my clients could greatly benifit from this technology. 

The many benifits of this new system far outweigh the downfalls! From my brief overview, the only downfall at this point to me is the fact that all of the pages are coded like the old ASP.Classic pages with imbedded code within the page.  There are still code behind pages containing partial classes however.  The many benifits include: Ease of page Addition, Plain Text URL's and Secure pages.

The way that ASP.Net MVC works is by using a new Router object behind the screens.  This allows IIS to pass a request into the .Net runtime and then the runtime passes the information about the request to the Router object; this in turn figures out what the request wants; and populates a screen to return. The great thing about this, is that a URL to search for some sci-fi books that looked like this http://www.foo.org?id=`12-3333-45-9291'&cat=12&user=12389&session=9292939-9494940-939392302-902982 could turn into this http://www.foo.org/books/Sci-Fi. I'm not too sure if you can see the usefullness of this, but I can!

Another GREAT addition is the use of the View folder that allows the .ASPX pages to hide in a directory that cannot be thought/hacked through a thoughful URL call. The Router object intercepts the calls from IIS and either returns the 404 Error page; or it renders the requested view. The view is rendered by pulling the approporate controller and view and combining the data and HTML code, and passing the information to the callers browser.  The end user knows nothing about where or how the data is located or derived from thus allowing a greater level of security within your web application.

I'm planning on doing a bit more digging around within this framework and I'll keep posting as I find cool information; or things change since we are only dealing with Preview #3....

  -NFE