So everyone's been talking about the ALT.NET conference, Microsoft's take on MVC, and such, so I thought I'd briefly chime in with my thoughts. First of all, the ALT.NET conference rocked and I'm very much looking forward to the next one. Secondly, I must disclose that Scott Bellware paid me to say that ($1, signed) but I would have said it anyway.

OK, so then there's the whole MVC thing. This too was awesome and I should try and collect a signed dollar from Scott Guthrie. It's obvious he and the team working on MVC are doing their research. That said, as many of you know we're a MonoRail shop here. We've been using it heavily for about a year now and we've got a lot of code written on it. So what will the impending release of the MS MVC framework mean for us? What will it mean for MonoRail?

I can tell you that for us, it will very likely mean a week of exploration and quite possibly followed by a week or two of porting. That's right, it looked that good. Everything about it was done right or flexible enough to be made right so there really isn't any room to complain about it. MonoRail has more features at the moment, but the ones we use wouldn't be difficult to implement on top of MS MVC.

So what does this mean for MonoRail? I can't speak to that, but I will tell you what I would like for it to mean. What I'd like to see is MonoRail become more like Rails. I want to see something built on top of MS MVC that even more-so favors Convention over Configuration--including but not limited to generators and such. I want it to take it to the next level and be exactly what the community wants for a C# web platform. Dave Laribee says that "MonoRail will remain a viable option for smaller or more edgy shops." I think that's true, but I want to see it built on top of MS MVC.

Why throw away all of the framework code built into MonoRail? A few reasons:

1. Castle has already been experimenting with throwing most of it away and starting over anyway.
2. MS MVC will be built into the .NET Framework. This means  easier sells to big shops, and MonoRail would be just a free supplement rather than a replacement/paradigm shift, making it an easier sell.
3. MS MVC appears to be more modular. There is no massive Controller or ginormous SmartDispatcherController. You can even start with a one method interface and implement your controller however you want.
4. Routing.
5. It was built with testability in mind. MonoRail is now mostly testable, but it is not nearly as clean as it could be... or as MS MVC's testability looks.
6. We can probably all but throw away our codegenerator and use lambdas. We could reinvent this for MonoRail in .NET 3.5 but then we'd be... reinventing... it...

Whatever we decide to do when it comes out, we'll talk about our experiences so you can judge for yourself after we judge for ourselves how viable it will be to port from MonoRail to MS MVC.