MVC3 and Orchard released

Slowly coming back from hibernation, I have spent a few days trying to catch up with things that have happened in the last couple of months or so; many people have been really busy, and right now I find it difficult to catch up with everything that is going on only in the technologies I am actively using. So instead of even trying, I have opened my drawers to pull out some old code, e.g. the rest of the Transportation Algorithm that I sort of announced when writing about Stepping Stones back when. It is one of those that are quick to outline on paper, but take an awful lot of code writing. Of course, F# isn’t all that verbose, so the whole article will be up in the next few days.

There is also a new web site set up by Tomas Petricek that aims to collect little F# code snippets. It is a useful way to make single functions or one/two/three liners available to other coders, when these bits and pieces really don’t merit their own article. It also makes you feel good about yourself to give stuff away. Anyhow, I have today proudly made my first submission and will try to keep up the habit.

I also have this pet project (secret) that I once started using ASP.NET MVC 2 and recently took up again with the MVC 3 beta. So one of the highlights of the week from where I am standing is the release of MVC 3, together with some of the goodies that come with it. I love coding with Razor, it almost makes you forget you’re producing HTML. Or rather, it integrates so easily with the HTML markup that you hardly notice the clash of technologies that web development is. I guess elegant is the word.

Now you get this, and on top of it there’s a whole Content Management System that’s just a Visual Studio project template away, so to say. From what I have seen today of Orchard, integrating user and content management into your own web application will be so much more fun. I had a look into integrating bespoke web applications with CMS’es in the past; there are several dozen out there, and some are quite brilliant. Liferay is an impressive piece of work, DotNetNuke isn’t half bad either. But in the end, in order to integrate any of these big, monolithic things and their respective design philosophies within one’s own software requires to learn so many things about their internals that it is really only worth if this integration work is what you do for a living.

Imagine, however, creating an MVC 3 project that just is a CMS from the start, but where you can also have your own actions and views, and web services, and backend software and and and…

There will be a catch, or more than one, and I am planning to find out. But the thought for the day is just why didn’t I think of that?