Mad, Beautiful Ideas
ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1

As per both ScottGu and Phil HAACK, ASP.NET MVC has it's first release candidate today, not to mention it's first major bug disclosure. ACtually, I consider the bug to be more of an issue with ASP.NET in general, but c'est la vie.

I've been using ASP.NET MVC since the CTP 2 days, at least for a few projects, and I really want to congratulate Phil Haack's teams for getting this out. I've really appreciated being able to write truly 'webby' applications using C#. While I'm still a fan of other MVC frameworks like Django and Catalyst, it's great to have access to a solid MVC framework in .NET. Plus, even though Microsoft endorsed JQuery in this product, I can still use YUI with it cleanly.

Now, I haven't looked much at the fubuMVC, which was created in response to what was seen as failing in ASP.NET MVC, but I've been really happy with it so far. Now, I do really want to see the MVC framework released in the MS-PL or something similar, but while the code is technically available today, I don't expect to see it get any more open than it is. Which is unfortunate.

I've always hated ASP.NET because it tries way, way too hard to make the Web not behave like the web, and is a nightmare to debug. MVC is a great middle ground in this respect, because you have access to the ASP.NET controls, if you want, but it doesn't abstract away the nature of the Web in a difficult or painful manner. If you're looking to do a new web project, and you know you're using .NET for it, I'd encourage you to consider ASP.NET MVC. Now, I just need to figure out if the Release Candidate will work on Mono...