What has gone before-I had problems installing blog software with my host, so I decided to write my own. I sort of force myself to do ASP.Net MVC, and was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it. I decided to do it as a multi-blog site just to make life interesting, and then used LINQ and realized that it made life pretty easy.
So now that I've described to you the underpinnings of my site. Here is where I get into the MVC stuff. There were a few areas that I'll dive into such as
- How I used ViewData - Essentially it was the debate do I use ViewData[""] or create model classes and pass everything back that way?
- How I mapped my Routes - Which was largely based around how I wanted to target my different blogs.
- Where, when and why I used Ajax and how I used it - I tried using the MVC Ajax stuff, but I really didn't care for it. It didn't feel all that easy to use.
- How to page my results in my web UI (again, I'm used to Web Forms power
- What to use for an archive calendar control.
- How to return submission errors back to the user and display them on the page.
I'm sure some other stuff came up, but that is what I remember as being the big issues I encountered.
Overall I find I really like ASP.Net MVC. I've done a lot of Web Forms stuff in the past, and I find I prefer MVC. From organizing my code, to having clean handling of my page submissions its a nice clear cut way to write web code. Its funny I got so used to having all the control with web forms that I thought going back to bare bones HTML type of code would limit what I could do. Instead I found I could do a lot more if I was willing to spend a little extra time on it.