Question

I’m learning MVC3 (my first touch with MVC) and going through tutorials in the book Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework, 3rd edition.

As I go through the tutorials I am started to get a little scared of all the automagic stuff going on. What I hated about ASP.NET webforms was all the automagic, smoke and mirrors.

I like dealing with the nuts and bolts more often than not because I don’t like the whole “And then you just trust the system to do it’s thing, trust us, it will work”, because even though it does work most of the time, whenever you go out of bounds or want to do something more complicated, the obfuscation of the smoke and mirrors causes a lot of headaches (ok this paragraph was a bit of a rant, though necessary for my point).

Before I get too far down this road…is MVC3 just a more sophisticated, smoke and mirrors, obfuscating framework like ASP.NET webforms, or is it going to allow me to peek under the hood and get into the details more easily than asp.net? Is this worth continuing?

SIDE NOTE: PLEASE, if you don’t like this question, don’t vote it down. Help me make it better so it can benefit the community. Thank you! 🙂

Answer 1

I’ve been working with this framework for one year and a half, and all the “magic” stuff has never got in my way, actually most of the time it has helped me, and when it hasn’t then I just have coded around it.

I mean you can code the way you want. You don’t like the “Routing” feature? you can change it as easy as going to web.config and rewrite it.

You don’t like the binding magic for your parameters? Then get them manually HttpContext.Request.Params["yourParameter"].

You don’t want to use EF?, ok use whatever ORM you want or just create your own ORM and use it.

You don’t like the MVC pattern? then write all your code inside your views (I think I went too far).

I mean it’s even open source, do you want your own magic inside the framework? you can do it.

In my very personal opinion, it is worth continuing.