I have managed to arrange Ian Crowther, an ex-colleague from Avanade, to come and do a brown bag session for me and my employees this Saturday 14th March at my office near Haslemere in the UK.

Ian has been working a lot with Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI recently. He is going to give a presentation and then run a practical coding workshop on Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI showing how to combine them to [more]produce some sexy looking websites. In the workshop we are going to attempt to re-implement a recent asp.net web forms project See The Link have been working on as an asp.net MVC.net project. I’m really excited to find out more about how this will work and what the result will be! If they are good I’m hoping to put the MVC.net version live instead of the original web forms version.

I know that it is short notice but I am opening up this event to any techies who might be interested. I have space for another 3 people so if you want to come along then ping me an email before this Friday. We will be starting at 10am on Saturday going onto whenever (hopefully be about 4-6 hours or so)!

While I've had my head stuck in Crm for the last year I appear to have missed a very important release for ASP.net - Microsoft's Model View Controller (MVC).

The majority of people I meet think that ASP.net is Webforms. This is not true.

ASP.net is the framework and [more] Webforms is what Microsoft gives out of the box to developers to create webpages. If you wanted you could write your own rendering engines on ASP.net and not even touch webforms - go back to Asp classic or php style of creating pages. However I like how Webforms is declarative, easy to read and I'm able to leverage work done others in a simple way.

So now Microsoft have released a second 'out of the box' method to create webpages with ASP.net to developers which (from what I've read so far) is superior to the initial Webforms option.

Things that are getting me excited about MVC method are:

• Easy to write unit tests
• Much more control over html output to create semantically correct html therefore fully leverage the power of css and get higher ranking on Google ;)
• Plugable Javascript / Ajax engines

So when I get home tomorrow I'll be downloading, installing and having a play as I think this will enable me to create better quality webpages using ASP.net.

http://www.asp.net/mvc/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx