Warning: highly subjective content ahead.

In the recent weeks we’ve seen several control vendors come up with toolkits that target ASP.NET MVC. Personally, I don’t see anything that might make me starting to consider picking one of these toolkits to speed up development. Why on earth would I prefer a wrapper around jQuery UI or shoehorning existing WebForms controls in MVC views?

The beauty of ASP.NET MVC is that it embraces the web as it is and this automatically involves HTML, CSS and Javascript. Don’t be afraid for that. The combination can be so powerful! Why aren’t there any large component vendors for PHP, Rails, Django etc? Isn’t it probably possible that these components are not required to do proper web development?

The control vendors seem to be targeting people who come from a Windows background that don’t want to learn HTML and Javascript, but from my experiences I can say that those people should really stick to WebForms.

For a long time, there has been a distinct separation between ASP.NET and PHP developers. The platforms have been so fundamentally different and also have the surrounding cultures. Generally speaking, ASP.NET developers consider the PHP guys script kiddies with no real understanding of ‘real’ software development and the PHP guys saw ASP.NET developers as some M$ infected bunch of people that have no clue of web standards, clean HTML or how to build a proper web app at all.

But times have changed. Both platforms are moving. PHP now has a whole bunch of application frameworks (Zend, CakePHP etc.) that encourage good application design and also since PHP 5, the programming language has improved a lot. On the other hand, with the release of ASP.NET MVC, it has become much more easy to render clean HTML and we can finally leverage all the cool client-side toolkits that are out there without having to work around the quirks of Web Forms. 

So, with this movement, we see that both platforms grow towards each other. More and more developers come to have a look over the fence to see what’s happening at the neighbours place.

Two concrete examples:

• I’m consulting a little at a PHP shop that is moving towards .NET. They found Visual Studio and C# very cool, but the Web Forms issues regarding clean HTML etc. made it an absolute no-go. ASP.NET MVC is what made them switch.
• Just watched the ASP.NET MVC Mix 09 presentation of Rob Conery (Microsoft) and he showed lots of things that were clearly inspired by how PHP apps like WordPress work.

I like this movement! As a .NET developer, I find it very refreshing and inspiring to mix and mingle with ‘the other side’. There is a lot we can learn from each other to make better web applications.

Lots of companies are positioning SharePoint as their preferred platform for everything that has to do with the web, both intranet and public facing websites. Now out-of-the-box, SharePoint delivers excellent value, but when building custom functionality or public facing sites, there are some serious issues.

My biggest gripes are:

• The whole development experience is awful. Yes, you can create custom webparts, but I’ve yet to come across the one that isn’t a big ball of mud. Also, the entire cycle of compiling, deploying and testing takes way too long to be productive at all. One minute is pretty common. Gosh, I wonder why all these projects are late every time ;
• The HTML output is a mess. Not so much a problem for intranets, but for public sites it is. With a zillion tweaks, it is possible to fix it, but then again, no wonder these projects are late every time;

I’ve been thinking how to improve this situation. Sure, I could say: “just don’t use SharePoint for your public web sites”, but companies are going to push everything to Sharepoint anyway. The whitepapers and consultants will tell them that everything is possible and it’s from Microsoft, so it’s a safe bet. We (as in Microsoft developers) simply have to deal with it the next years.

A Cunning Plan

First: let’s focus on publishing sites. I want to have:

• Clean standards-based HTML;
• Clean url’s;
• The ability to add custom applications as a feature without being restricted to webparts, or even better: develop applications standalone and deploy to Sharepoint when they’re ready;
• Leverage the SharePoint infrastructure (sites, lists, security, etc);

Looks impossible but is it really?

Couldn’t we not drop in System.Web.Routing, create a special SharePointRouteHandler, that sets up required sharepoint infrastructure and delegates the request to a Controller to have ASP.NET MVC within the SharePoint context? I think it’s hard and complex, but not impossible. We could leverage all strong points of ASP.NET MVC like separation of concerns, testability, clean HTML together with the huge foundation that SharePoint offers.

Plan B

Microsoft is already working on this situation and the next version of SharePoint will address the situation properly.

Now, please tell me that I’m a: ambitious, b: naive or c: completely insane .