Hank Luhring’s Blog

We are looking into using Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC.  At this point (10/30/2008), the first beta was released two weeks ago.  Before that there was a series of preview releases.  There is talk about a version 1 release around the end of the year.

It is interesting to me to see how interested Microsoft is in getting feedback from the development community on how to make the MVC product as good as it can be.  One small example is the issue of “area” routes.  Here is a discussion thread on the topic:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/altdotnet/message/16483 

(Looking at the URL above, could the Yahoo groups application have been written using MVC?  That’s one of the benefits of MVC – URLs that make sense in terms of the application, as opposed to simpling reflecting how the file system is laid out.)

 In this particular discussion, Phil Haack has spent quite a bit of time reading the posts, asking questions, suggesting alternatives.  Finally he says this:

“We’re going to take a deep look at this. I’ll probably put together some samples later with guidance on this and run it by you to make sure we address these issues properly. At the very least, we want to ensure that guidance and the right extensibility hooks are available in v1, even if a full implementation doesn’t make it into v1.

Thanks for bringing this up again.

Phil”

This is a WONDERFUL sign that Microsoft realizes there are people in the development community that sometimes have ideas that might be better than theirs, and that they (Microsoft) will produce a better product if they listen closely to their developer customers.

It’s my understanding that Phil Haack is a decision-maker for Microsoft MVC, and for him to be actively communicating with developers is great.  He listened, made suggestions, those suggestions were rejected, he made other suggestions, those were rejected too.  He made it clear he wants to truly understand the problem, and he even asked how the area routes were implemented in a non-Microsoft package.

Developers today have a lot of choices in what technology to use when building applications.  With the commitment that Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman and others under Scott Guthrie show towards working first-hand with their developer customers, I think it is smart on our part to continue to use Microsoft’s developer tools.

Scott Hanselman, my favorite podcaster, has produced several podcasts on JavaScript recently.  One of the best was with John Resig, a developer of JQuery.  jQuery is an AJAX framework that is very quickly gaining acceptance among developers building rich internet applications.

jQuery is open source.  Microsoft products are not, of course.  jQuery is such a good package that people would like to use it alongside Microsoft’s offerings.

In an announcement a few days ago, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft said that Microsoft will include jQuery with their Visual Studio product.

The amazing thing is that Microsoft has not purchased and taken over jQuery.  Instead, they will simply include the jQuery library in Visual Studio.  The original jQuery team will retain control over jQuery.  If Microsoft wants a new feature added, they will submit it to the jQuery team, who will decide whether to include it.  The jQuery team will do the development, not Microsoft.

Since jQuery is open source, there will be no additional charges.

Scott Guthrie writes in his blog:

“Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?”

That makes a lot of sense.  It is an explicit acknowledgement by Microsoft that they are not the best at everything.  It also shows that in this case they are interested in providing top-notch tools for the developer community, whether under their control or not.

It is quite an amazing step they are taking, and great news for the developer community.