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.

Answer 1

I've just been recently turned on to MVC and Linq to Sql for Asp.Net. I'm still learning both, and I'm really enjoying them both. There are quite a few screen casts on http://www.asp.net/learn/.

Answer 2

I've been getting into some pretty heavy use of NHibernate with ASP.NET MVC lately, and am really loving it.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

I used the MVC framework to build a small site, and I found myself frequently frustrated by the tag soup views, and lack of the server controls I had come to love.

I went back to using webforms.

WebForms, once mastered, are great...They just take a very long time to learn all the tricks.

Answer 5

Why the choice of NHibernate over anything else?

It's a very powerful tool, and is (relatively) easy to learn. It takes away all the monotony and repetitiveness of manually implementing object-relational mapping.

Answer 6

I have used ASP.NET MVC for a few projects recently and its like a breath of fresh air compared to WebForms. It works with the web rather than against it, and feels like a much more natural way to develop.

I use SubSonic rather than NHibernate, and find it fits very nice within the MVC architecture.

The building blocks I commonly use for a website are:-

Asp.net mvc Subsonic SQL Server Lucene JQuery

Answer 7

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.