Question

At work we are inte process of starting development on a new web-based product. Before doing so we need to establish what technology stack we are going to use. For this application my preference would have been to use Django but since the development- and management-team is soo heavily rooted with Microsoft the new product will have to be based on Microsoft technologies.

So my question is, what setup, with Microsoft technologies, would most resemble a django setup with its MVT-design?

Answer 1

The two biggest MVC frameworks for .NET are Castle MonoRail, which is a complete MVC framework and ASP.NET MVC, but which only contains the Controller and View part, and you need a separate ORM framework for it. The latter is backed by Microsoft, but you should check one of the frameworks based on ASP.NET MVC for a streamlined quick start.

I’d suggest frameworks and examples based on S#arp Architecture (which is based on ASP.NET MVC 2 and uses Fluent NHibernate as the ORM). It has a fork named Shaml (made by me) which has a console based generator utility (resembling merb and rails), and a test application that shows how S#arp Architecture can be used to create a complete site.

You can also choose from other frameworks, or stick with the bare ASP.NET MVC using either Linq to SQL or Entity Framework, but coming from Django I’d advice you to check for a more complete framework.

EDIT: There is also the Bistro Frameworks which uses the NDjango templating language as default. I don’t know much about this framework but it’s view engine is clearly resembling Django.