As an IT person I have a morning routine of visiting a few of my favorite blogs so I can keep up to date on the latest and greatest. My first trip is usually over to Scott Hanselman's blog. I have been following Scott for a few years now and I was reading his blog way before he became a "blue badger" (Industry slang for a Microsoft employee). Anyway, the big news on Scott's blog today was that the first 185 pages of his ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) 1.0 book is released for free under the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives license. I am not really going to pretend that I know what that means but according to Scott: "You can share, distribute, hand out, transmit it all you like. You can even include it in your own book if you'd like. ;)".
Anyway, MVC is something that ASP.NET developers have been waiting for a long time. I remember doing a MVC J2EE web application a few years ago and wondering to myself...Why don't we have this functionality in ASP.NET? One of the things that I like most about MVC is URL Routing. If you have done any web development you have probably developed an application which passes parameters as part of the query string. For example if you search for "MVC" on Google you will notice that the URL ends up being
http://www.google.com/search?q=MVC&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1.
MVC gives you the ability to transform this URL into a more readable format such as
http://www.google.com/search/MVC.
I am not saying that there is anything wrong with passing parameters on the query string but the second URL is a little easier to decipher.If you are interesting in learning more about ASP.NET MVC then I recommend viewing these links. And of course, don't forget to download the eBook!
