If you were following our blog at the end of last year, you read my entry on MVC - Wrestling an Enterprise Architecture out of .NET. Well, we pressed forward and developed a fully-working MVC2 architecture on top of ASP.NET. We've had some bumps along the way, but we think it's been worth the effort to move to an MVC2 architecture. The benefit of moving the majority of your application's logic into controllers cannot be overstated. Testing and API extensibility are just a couple of the huge benefits. We said as much to Scott Guthrie in an email conversation at the beginning of this year, and asked why Microsoft didn't address this architectural need.
We were very pleased to hear that Microsoft is going to do just that with their MVC framework in ASP.NET, and it feels good to know we were ahead of the curve. Matt Vasquez and I also had the honor of attending a Software Design Review of MVC and some other technologies, along with about 20 others, in Redmond last week. It was a great event, with tons of info on upcoming technologies and some good conversations with the developers. Not to mention the fact that a thirty second question to Scott Guthrie after dinner solved a problem that our development team has spent at least a collective 24 hours trying to figure out. While everything covered in the SDR is under a non-disclosure, suffice it to say that we're excited about this new MVC support from Microsoft. Our home-grown architecture is very legitimized by what we saw. We're very close to what they've developed, but I'm sure we'll be able to use a lot of what they're creating to more cleanly handle what we had to hack onto ASP.NET. It's also exciting to be able to influence the development of this new framework. I plan on cranking some code from the SDR bits starting this weekend and giving lots of juicy feedback.
I pray that all our customers know that we place a great deal of importance on innovation. It's a high priority for us to innovate both our architecture and our processes to improve our product, and we aren't afraid to go to the lengths necessary to align our development with future-thinking choices. It takes a pioneering spirit to not only see where technology needs to go, but to also take the effort/time/risk to move in that direction. This past year, we moved to the Agile process of Scrum and created our own MVC architecture on top of ASP.NET. All of our new development now adhears to the MVC pattern (MVC2 if you want to be specific). God has given us a pioneering spirit, and we're excited about where He's leading us.
thardy