Over the last week I have been playing around with the ASP.NET MVC 2 RC framework. The original preview download link referenced by this post is no longer available.
So far I feel like I have gone backwards from the rich UI development environment of ASP.NET Webforms. However as I write more an more code and look over more examples I am finding the main benefit is total control over what is output to the browser and very testable. Testing has been something I have avoided so far when it comes to webforms because of the complex approach of having to simulate the browser.
Today I was about to write up some blog posts about my experience so far and some of things I found helped me get started. However I also found a great resource today that explains exactly what I was going to write about and then some. Whoever wrote these articles thinks exactly like I do and did a fantastic job of explaining how to use MVC.
The original ASP.NET MVC learning-center page linked here is no longer online. Microsoft still preserves documentation for older versions of ASP.NET MVC.
I plan on writting several applications using MVC to get myself more familiar and will then be posting some articles showing the same application written in winforms and mvc so that I can compare the advantages of each.
Here is the list of Applications I plan to build. Note each of them pretty simple apps.
Knowledgebase Application - Will allow creating / search of knowledge base information similiar to the microsoft knowledgebase available at support.microsoft.com
Download Center - Will allow simple management for publishing documents/software that need to be made available for download. Will be similiar to downloads.microsoft.com