After PDC, I started to investigate the ASP.NET MVC framework more deeply.

Back in 2001, when I joined TechTalk, the company was developing a web development framework called TTIC.NET. I guess there was even a TTIC before, but when I was hired, they were already working with .NET (1.0 beta).

I don’t remember how far we got with TTIC.NET, but we aborted the project in 2002 and as far as I know there is only one application running today that uses this framework (our internal bugtracking application). But interestingly, now as I’m doing some research on MVC, I feel a little bit like in 2001, confronting the same problems and suffering from the same issues. Or at least similar ones. TTIC.NET used MVC pattern to display the data, although there were no generics, ajax, extension methods and such things. MVC is a quite old pattern, with its own problematic points. I somehow hoped that with the new ASP.NET MVC framework everything would be smooth and easy. But it isn’t. It isn’t yet.

In this blog series, I would like to document the way how I learned about the MVC frameworks and what problems I have encountered. Most of them are still unanswered, and as I’m moving on with my research, I would like to find the answers to these questions.

I have started my research with checking out the videos and tutorials at http://www.asp.net/mvc/. After that I tried to rewrite one of our code samples for Genome to use an MVC front-end (keeping the back-end and the UI design) with more or less success.

(In the articles, if not mentioned explicitly, with MVC I’m always referring to Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Beta.)