Comments on: ASP.NET MVC + jQuery - can things get any better for web developers?

By: Joel Cochran

Joel Cochran — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:12:24 +0000

I’ve been developing web sites for about 10 years: PHP, CGI, JavaScript, etc., and coding C# for the last five. I could never get into ASP.NET. I always found it disappointing that I couldn’t simply use C# when I needed to and regular HTML for everything else: the Postback and Viewstate approach ruined ASP.NET for me. That is, until I found ASP.NET MVC, which I have been using since Preview 2. During Preview 3 I found jQuery, and between the two I am actually having fun developing web sites again.

While I’m not sure if it will actively draw more developers in, I will say that it certainly makes the idea more palatable for traditional “hands on” web developers like myself. As you mentioned, and Scott Hanselman demonstrated, now there is room in ASP.NET land for virtually everyone.

Kudos to Microsoft for giving first class support to such an outstanding open source project as jQuery, I hope it is a sign of more to come.

By: James

James — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:42:30 +0000

Yes it does actually, and that was the point I was making. ASP.NET MVC works in the same way as Ruby on Rails or Django or any of the other MVC frameworks, giving you full control over your HTML. You can use some server controls with it (it’s only postbacks that you lose out on, so you couldn’t use it with controls that need to be rendered in a server-side form such as the GridView or the Calendar) and you can also have some parts of your website in MVC and some in traditional Web Forms if you’re that way inclined (Scott Hanselman has a good post on this.) The upshot of this is that with ASP.NET there’s pretty much an approach to cater for every taste. jQuery is just the icing on that particular cake.

Incidentally, the key to what I was saying is that I hope it will attract developers back to ASP.NET — unfortunately there are some characters out there who avoid it like the plague for no other reason than that it’s by Microsoft. Personally I think that’s a bit sad, because it really is a very capable framework and you can optimise it to go blazingly fast if you’re so inclined.

By: Richard Marr

Richard Marr — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:31:52 +0000

I agree with you that JQuery is a breath of fresh air, and probably a smart move by the ASP.NET team.

I’m suspect of your theory that it will attract developers back to ASP.NET though. UI developers want elegant tools, and I think ASP feels too clunky. For example, all of that mucking about trying to figure out DOM IDs for controls. It’s just not a pleasant model to work with, for me anyway. Does the MVC system fix that?