Twin Cities Code Camp

ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) is one the new shiny technologies from Microsoft. We will take a quick tour of the M, V, and C of MVC. While the Controllers and the Models are very nice, the real fun is with the View Engines. That's right! ASP.NET MVC supports a gaggle of different view engines. We will take a look at a representative set of view engines (ASP.NET, Spark, and NHAML in some detail) and a quick "fly by" of other (NVelocity and Brail). We will look at the good and bad of the coding experience, the debugging experience, and the (dreaded) maintenance experience. All of this will be useful input to the selection of a view engine for your next project.

The secret is that the selection does not have to be exclusive. Fun Fact: you can use multiple view engines in the same application. Funner (OK, Even More Fun) Fact: you can even use multiple view engines on the same web page. Come and see how to make the magic happen. More goodies: see how to write your own view engine for fun and profit; if I told you how easy it was, you might think it was a scam.

But wait! there is more: in our "Bait and Switch" department, you can see how to switch the view that you that you use in order to support mobile browsers. You can even switch view engines on the fly. Learn how to log data for a subset of web pages (determined by values in your application configuration file) by using a different View Engine. Bring up your mastery of this dynamite technique at your next social gathering and see how many admiring glances you get.

And there will be unit testing. Yes, even the HTML produced by a view can be unit tested. Sprinkle a little pixie dust on the view, chant "separation of concerns" three times, and be able to verify that goodness of the incoming model has been transformed into even more wonderful HTML. How cool is that?