By now you'll probably know that we released (in beta) a
new version, I guess you'd call it, of ASP.NET. It's not really a new version -- same old ASP.NET behind the scenes -- just a new and simpler syntax on top of ASP.NET. There are various ways to think about this, like "MVC for the rest of us" or "ASP Classic done right" or, you know, many others. :-) The emphasis is on reducing the amount of code (indeed, the "concept count") required to do many of the things that people want to be able to do with websites.
I just love this stuff. The Web Forms model was predicated on the idea of making web development something like forms for Windows client apps -- the page is a form, you drop controls onto it, set their properties, and respond to their events. This basically worked, although as many people pointed out over the years, this type of client-forms analogy was a
leaky abstraction. There's a certain black-box quality to the Web Forms model, and to do tricky stuff -- perhaps
just adding controls on the fly -- tended to make it clear just how much man there was behind the curtain. Plus its 8+ years of development have left it with a certain amont of cruft; even internally we still see questions about how to do things with (e.g.) the
DataGrid control.
ASP.NET MVC [
more]