From Monorail to ASP.Net MVC

Question

The last time I took on a non-trivial .Net/C# application I used Castle Monorail and, on the whole, enjoyed the experience. Early-access/preview releases of .Net MVC were not yet available. Many "Microsoft shops" will now find the "official" solution more appealing. Has anyone gone from Monorail to .Net MVC.

How did you find the switch?
What are the biggest differences, presently?

Subclass

Answer 1

I have made the switch, since you pointed out it will be the preferred way for microsoft shops. The switch was pretty trivial and as Mike pointed out it ships with the webform view engine as the default, but like Mike also said you can still take advantage of the views you wrote in brail and nvelocity with the MvcContrib project. ASP.NET MVC, doesn't tie you to a direct ViewEngine, you can use any ViewEngine you want. I don't necessarily think this is a difference.

The biggest difference I found was grouping my controllers and views. In MonoRail you could do this easily with the ControllerDetails attribute, I was able to easily get around this limitation by coding my own, but wish the functionality was built in. I did it by creating my own ViewLocator and creating a ActionFilterAttribute.

Villanovan

Answer 2

I am a monorail user, so far I still feel more comfortable on MonoRail + ActiveRecord due to the convenience built at ActiveRecord ARSmartDispatchController. However have to say MonoRail does not have a good documentation base so far (I am one of those should be blamed as the community participant who didn't help enough to write the docs)

As I saw the comments here, ASP.NET MVC use WebForm view engine. I think MonoRail has that too but was being blamed to be quite problematic, so I wonder how is the experience with ASP.NET MVC WebForm- can you use the web form components mostly the way it works as is or you have to basically abandon most of them and stick to more template style approach (like <%= or <%# ?

Mitchellmitchem

Answer 3

While I haven't made the switch yet, I have developed on both platforms and have been doing some pre-switch analysis.

It looks like the biggest difference would be the View Engines. Our Monorail stuff uses the Brail view engine while asp.net mvc comes (stock) with a webforms like view engine. There are other view engines in MvcContrib which could help in this area, though.

Also ViewComponents and view "helpers" seem to be handled quite differently the two frameworks.

Abnormality

Answer 4

Lucky I am not working for an organization use product ship from Microsoft is a needed. So I might not directly answer to your question, However in term of using MonoRail I enjoy every part of the framework although the lack of documentation but test suite are there to guide me through.

In short I do not want to invested time in learning new framework although it closely match (each had it own convention) but ASP.NET MVC still lack of some features that I already familiar with such as feature mention by Dale Ragon ControllerDetail, ActiveRecord and so on.

Amorphism

Answer 5

The ASP.NET MVC team is still making changes before v1.0, so now's a good time to provide feedback.

Also, be aware that there are more frequent releases on CodePlex, while the home page on www.asp.net still links to Preview 3.

Repeated