The state of MVC

The other day, a nice fellow named Sam emailed me with regard to my blog post The Model, the View, and the ... Other one, one of my more popular blog posts that will soon celebrate its first anniversary. Sam asked me if I had learned more since then.  I answered him, and then I though "why not write a blog entry about it?"  So here goes (italic is taken from my answer to Sam).

Unfortunately, I didn't get to work on those topics quite as much as I wanted to. Several things distracted me, like organizing my wedding, completely unrelated projects at work, studying to become MCSD, and so on.

What I did find/learn in the meantime:

• There's a series of webcasts about smart client development here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/modernsoftdev.mspx#ArchitectingModernDesktopAppsinNET - they have been out there for some time, but I only recently found time to watch them. I'm in the middle of Webcast 2 (of 15) which is dedicated to things like "Visual Studio versus MVC" and the like.
• Then there's the Composite Application Block from MS's patterns and practices division: http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=22f72167-af95-44ce-a6ca-f2eafbf2653c and the related Smart Client Factory (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/scsflp.asp) - I've worked through a couple of hands-on-labs, and it looks very promising. Be prepared for a very steep learning curve, though.
• Most recently, I read Rockford Lhotka's book about CSLA.net: http://www.lhotka.net/ - it's not really about UI implementation (since it's about Business Objects) but it presents a solid framework for keeping business objects and business logic out of the UI layer. The second half of the book is about building the same application as a WinForms and as a WebForms ui without changes to the business logic. It uses databinding extensively but there are just as many people using CSLA with MVC.

There's also a very interesting article about the command pattern in Windows Presentation Foundation by Jelle Druyts on the Microsoft Benelux site.

I'm listing John Gossmann's posts about Model-View-ModelView here for easy reference:

• UML diagram of Model-View-ViewModel pattern
• CollectionView
• Advantages and disadvantages of M-V-VM
• First try at a ViewModel for the example
• Model-View-ViewModel
• Model-View-ViewModel pattern example