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Misc Updates: Twitter and ASP.NET MVC

07 March 2009 - 11:30 AM / by Dominic Pettifer. 0 Comments for Misc Updates: Twitter and ASP.NET MVC.

Personal Blog - Some miscellaneous updates. You can now find me on Twitter. I’m also learning ASP.NET MVC (Model, View, Controller) and in the process of converting this blog over to MVC.

Twitter

Yes I've been sucked in by the whole Twitter revolution thingy. I successfully managed to resist the whole MyFaceBebo fad, but I was no match for Twitter. Find me at twitter.com/Sironfoot. If you've been living in a cave (a cave on another planet) and have never heard of Twitter, it can basically be described as micro blogging; short, highly focused messages (of no longer than 140 characters) on whatever takes your interest. You can follow other Twitterers or be followed yourself.

Twitter has proven highly popular with celebrities, you can find Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross amongst others on Twitter, and you can follow them to see what they're up to. However, there are plenty of fake celebrities on Twitter, people pretending to be celebrities. Check out Valebrity.com, they validate celebrities on popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, their twitter account is twitter.com/valebrity.

ASP.NET MVC

I'm currently learning ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft's new web development framework built on .NET, it's meant as an alternative to the traditional ASP.NET WebForms approach (with its ViewState, UserControls etc.). The plan is to completely rewrite this blog using ASP.NET MVC.

MVC separates a webapp until three main parts, the View (what the user sees), the Model (contains business/validation logic and database access code), and the Controller (handles incoming requests from the user and interactions between the View and the Model). This facilitates separation concerns, so that each part is interdependent and loosely coupled, and can more easily be Unit Tested.

MVC gives the View writer more control over the HTML mark-up, there's no ViewState field for instance, incredibly long 'id' attributes, single <form> element per page restriction, or random ASP.NET AJAX external script files added in that you might not need, slowing your page down. MVC is more 'closer-to-the-metal' web development, it removes a lot of the higher level layers and layers of abstraction that conventional ASP.NET WebForms uses. You need to know the difference between GET and POST, there's no 'dragging-and-dropping-a-GridView-onto-the-page-and-configuring-properties' here, you have to get your hands dirty and do things a bit more manually.

For this reason, ASP.NET MVC might not be for everyone. But if you grow wearisome of WebForm's over abstraction, and want more control and testability (and nicer looking URLs such as www.example.com/Products/CPUs/1/Intel Core 2 Duo), then I'd definitely recommend checking MVC out. I've been using these tutorials on MVC on the ASP.NET website.

A warning to Internet Explorer 6 users though, I'm afraid you're going to be out in the cold this time. I know there's 12% of you who visit my blog, but catering for you has just been too difficult in the past, sorry! IE7 users will be fine though, just!