Experiences Using ASP.NET MVC Framework

Question

I am wondering what experiences people are having using the ASP.NET MVC Framework? In particular I am looking for feedback on the type of experience folks are having using the framework.

What are people using for their view engine? What about the db layer, NHibernate, LINQ to SQL or something else?

I know stackoverflow uses MVC, so please say this site.

Thank you.

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Why the choice of NHibernate over anything else? I am not against NHibernate, just wondering the rational.

Answer 1

I've been building a few sites with the framework since the first preview came out, and it has certainly come a long way already. It feels like a very light-weight and tidy framework.

There are a couple of areas where I think it really excels over "vanilla" asp.net:

• Enables a much cleaner separation of concerns/loose coupling
• makes test-driven development actually possible.
• And it's much more friendly towards javascript (ajax) heavy sites.

That said, there are some areas where it has some way to go yet:

• Validation
• Data binding
• Tag soup, as mentioned earlier (although this can be avoided to some extent; user controls, helper methods&codebehind is still allowed!)

The framework is still in beta though, so I expect these things to improve over time. Scott Hanselman has hinted that the Dynamic Data framework will be available for ASP.NET MVC at some point too, for example.