Hello,
Anyone out there using the new CSHTML pages feature and is finding that they prefer this new view engine syntax over the existing ASP.NET MVC default view engine or over web forms, and if so, why? What about CSHTML gives you an advantage over MVC or web forms, or vice versa?
Just curious to hear people's take on it.
Thanks.
One of the benefits is that Razor views can be rendered inside unit tests, this is something that was not easily possible with the previous ASP.Net renderer.
From ScottGu's announcement this is listed as one of the design goals:
Unit Testable: The new view engine implementation will support the ability to unit test views (without requiring a controller or web-server, and can be hosted in any unit test project – no special app-domain required).
The biggest benefit is that the code is more succinct. The VS editor will also have the itellesense support that some of the other view engines don't have.
Declarative HTML Helpers also look pretty cool as doing HTML helpers within C# code reminds me of custom controls in ASP.NET. I think they took a page from partials but with the inline code.
So some definite benefits over the asp.net view engine.
With contrast to a view engine like spark though:
Spark is still more succinct, you can keep the if's and loops within a html tag itself. The markup still just feels more natural to me.
You can code partials exactly how you would do a declarative helper, you'd just pass along the variables to the partial and you have the same thing. This has been around with spark for quite awhile.