The MVC pattern is not new technology, in fact quite the opposite. First developed by Trygve Reenskaug at Xerox Parc Labs in the late 1970s, you can find an implementation of the software pattern in most popular languages today. Zend under PHP and Ruby on Rails are just two well used applications of the MVC pattern, but Wikipedia lists twenty three separate implementations for PHP alone. It is not even the first to the party under ASP.NET – Maveric.Net, Monorail and ProMesh.Net have all been around for some time. However, with Microsoft’s offering MVC is now rolled right into the .Net Framework.

An MVC application is divided into three distinct roles, Models, Views and Controllers.

• Models handle the maintaining of state; usually this is persisted inside a database.
• Views are responsible for handling the display of the user interface.
• Controllers handle user interaction and ultimately decided which view to render.

This clean separation between the three roles, Model, View and Controller, makes an MVC application much easier to test. The MVC pattern also facilitates the use of red/green, or test driven development (TDD), where unit tests that define the requirements and scope of the code are written before the actual code itself.

ASP.NET MVC applications can be written using any of the .Net Framework languages and takes advantage of the frameworks existing support for features like authentication, membership and roles, output and data caching, session state management and the configuration system.

Routing

Developed as part of the MVC framework the routing engine – an exceptionally powerful URL routing system – allows you to set URL mapping rules to route incoming, and construct outgoing, URLs. The mapping rules are defined once, at the application level, within the Global.asax file. This means if you change the URL structure of your application you only need to modify this one set of mapping rules. The controllers and views in your application will continue to work totally unchanged.

The routing engine was initially in the System.Web.Mvc.Routing namespace, but has proved so useful it has been shuffled up the namespace tree into the System.Web.Routing, meaning it can now be used in web forms applications as well.

Your Views Are Your Own

The MVC framework was designed from the ground up to be pluggable and extensible. You can use Microsoft’s default routing or view engine, create your own, or swap them out the for third party offerings.

Out of the box views are created using .aspx pages, including full support for master and nested master pages. But you can use any existing templating language, with spark and nVelocity currently receiving a lot of attention. This, for web developers, is a huge plus in the frameworks favour. You can use the templating engine of your choice; you know nVelocity, use nVelocity. Prefer Spark? Fill your boots! You have 100% control of the angle brackets, you produce exactly the html you want.

A New Microsoft?

Whilst the ins and outs of the ASP.NET MVC framework are defiantly interesting and exciting for anyone developing under the .Net Framework, the way that Microsoft approached bringing the product to market is equally so. Better known for slow product cycles and closed development the MVC team appears to have instigated a paradigm shift.

Development of the ASP.NET MVC Framework has been open to scrutiny from a very early stage. The source code has been available for download from Codeplex, and the team asked for the community at large to review their work. Feedback was extensive, but when pushed for details of a release date the response was always “it’ll launch when its’ ready”. Now, for a company the size of Microsoft, whose life blood is a well structured product release cycle, that’s a bold statement of intent.

Then there is the ASP.NET MVC team itself. In October 2007 Scott Guthrie, the VP of DevDiv, hired two developers from within the .NET community. Phil Haack and Rob Conery had both developed and maintained successful open source projects, Phil with Subtext and Rob with Subsonic.

Plucking a couple of high profile and well respected open source developers, with established and widely used applications, out of the community was risky. Indeed, there was concern raised by avid fans that both Subtext and Subsonic would suffer adversely when Phil and Rob announced they would be working for Microsoft. It’s now a year down the line and both projects continue to flourish unhindered, despite the authors being assimilated by ‘the evil empire’.

In addition to actually getting ASP.NET MVC out the door both developers, and the rest of the MVC team, have been pumping out screencasts, application samples, and snippets of code at a prolific rate. On forums, the asp.net website and their own blogs the content just keeps rolling out. In fact the wealth of information available to anyone wanting to dip their toe in to the Microsoft flavoured MVC water is staggering; especially for a product that is yet to reach V1.0.

We sat down with Phil Haack to discuss how the MVC project has matured over the last twelve months and talk about his experience since joining the company.

odd: Phil, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. You have been at Microsoft a little over twelve months now, how has the experience differed from your expectations?

PH: One thing that has really differed from my expectations is that there is a real emphasis on work-life balance here that is more than just lip service. I expected everyone to work crazy hours all the time, but I’ve had my manager on several occasions warn me about not burning myself out. This is really a company that is in it for the long haul and you see that in many ways.

odd: You have obviously been extremely busy in the day job, how hard has it been to keep forging ahead with Subtext?

PH: Extremely hard, but partly because I have a one year old son now who is a joy to be around and I can’t rightly come home from work and ignore him and my wife. Also, I like to sleep a lot more now. I think it’s these dreary winters. After joining, I was able to help push out a 2.0 release, and I will get back into it again. Subtext development, like many OSS projects, tends to go in waves.

odd: We have mentioned that the source code for the ASP.NET MVC framework is available on Codeplex, could you briefly explain the scope of the license.

PH: The current license is a modified reference license. It allows you to change the source code to meet your needs, but not redistribute the code. It also allows you to go live with your application built on MVC, but at your own risk. My hope is to make the license even less restrictive than it is.

odd: It has been made clear from the start that ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for ASP.NET Web Forms but will sit alongside as an alternative option when building your applications. In what scenarios could YOU see the advantage of using MVC as opposed to Web Forms?

PH: I think MVC will provide an advantage for those building public facing “Web 2.0” style applications where the importance of human friendly “hackable” URLs, clean semantic markup, agile development, etc… are of the primary importance. For other systems built for the long haul where maintainability is a primary concern, I think MVC, with its focus on testability, will be advantageous.

odd: Could you give us an insight into what development methodologies were used to build out the MVC project; was is agile, did the team incorporate TDD, pair programming or continuous integration?

PH: It’s rather a hodge podge of methodologies, but most closely resembles “Scrum-but”. That’s a term for anything that’s like Scrum, but differs in some ways. We have roughly daily triage meetings and weekly design meetings. We have extensive unit test coverage, as unit test coverage is required before check-in. All check-ins are peer reviewed, but we don’t do pair programming. I’d like to implement continuous integration, but we don’t have it currently in place. We have a very small number of developers so it hasn’t bitten us in the butt too often.

odd: In reaching V1.0 there have been number of preview releases, how much feedback (positive and negative) did the team actually receive from the community, and how much influence did that feedback have in shaping the product we see today?

PH: The amount of feedback we’ve received has been immense and has had a huge influence in shaping the product. One specific example is the sheer amount of changes from Preview 2 to Preview 3 when we introduced the ActionResult. That was a result of direct feedback from many developers who complained about how difficult it was to test their controller actions.

Scott Guthrie, Eilon Lipton, and I had a long design meeting in Scott’s office where we hashed out this new design. It was hard work, and set our schedule back a bit, but we feel the improved design was worth it and the response to the change has been largely positive.

odd: It was recently announced that jQuery will ship as part of ASP.NET MVC, was that an easy sell to the Microsoft higher echelons?

PH: I wasn’t heavily involved in the decision making at the executive level. I know that Scott Guthrie, who is a Corporate VP, was heavily in favour of it, if not the driving force for it. I’m not sure how those above him reacted, but I think you’ll see that Microsoft’s attitude towards open source appears to be shifting in a positive direction. So it probably wasn’t as tough a sell as people might think.

odd: What would be your top tip for say a PHP or Ruby programmer looking to learn about developing a web site under the ASP.NET MVC framework?

PH: One of the benefits of developing for ASP.NET MVC is the underlying .NET Framework that the whole stack sits on. It’s common on other platforms to need to grab libraries from all sorts of other vendors who each provide varying levels of support, such as an XML library from here, a network library from there.

With .NET, the framework is fairly complete and fully supported. Security updates can be applied automatically without having to check five different places. The platform itself is very secure, scalable, and highly performant.

Not to mention that the tooling built on top of the stack is well integrated and makes development a breeze. Once yours sold on the .NET Framework, ASP.NET MVC will feel very familiar to a PHP or Ruby on Rails developer.

I am also the PM for dynamic languages on ASP.NET. As we bring that towards maturity, Ruby and Python developers will be able to benefit from all the advantages of the .NET Framework while still enjoying their favourite programming language.

A Bright Future

It’s clear that some departments within Microsoft are radically changing the way they bring products to market, embracing a more open and inclusive philosophy traditionally seen within the open source community. Will these changes improve the quality of Microsoft products? Will it change the web development community’s negative perception of the company? It’s too soon to tell, but in this little corner of the Microsoft behemoth, feedback seems very favourable.

The next port of call was my organisational methods. I’m pretty good at what I do, I’ve just spend quite a long time doing it without having to factor anyone else into the equation. I needed to re-equip myself with the tools and methodology to slot into a fairly well organised and established company.

So I started digging into GTD, or Getting Things Done, a productivity paradigm formulated by Dave Allen to help manage a hectic daily workload. In brief, it’s based around task lists and actioning those the tasks on them at the appropriate time (if you need to buy toilet roll there is no point being reminded to pick some up when you are in the middle of a meeting). The principles are simple and the explanation by Dave Allen in his book are clear and concise, I’m now well on the way to getting all my ‘stuff’ in order.

Enter The Technology

In the home-office I work on PC, it’s a lifestyle choice that I know not every designer agrees with, but it’s my life, my choice if anyone calls me out I can fill any number of posts explaining why it’s my prefered option.

At work the studio desktops are Mac only, that’s their choice and I need to live with that – which I would be totally happy to do if there were a decent email client for the Mac. Entourage is just ‘designered up’ enough to be a nightmare for an Outlook user, and Mac Mail is simply dreadful, dreadful in all the nasty spiky teeth ways you can imagine.

I really did try to live with Entourage, but after two months I gave up and bought a Tosh laptop. To keep the studio happy the Tosh sits, just slightly ajar, at the back of my desk and I RDC into Windows 7 (2) from the Mac to use Outlook (and the other Office apps which I much prefer to the Mac offerings).

To round things off nicely I have an iPhone 3G, almost the perfect SmartPhone. If you could mush together all the good of the iPhone and all the good of the N95 (my previous phone) I truly believe you would have the ultimate SmartPhone.

So I have all this cross-platform kit I now need to get syncing with each other. Email is easy now I’m on an exchange server, I can log in from the Home PC, the Tosh laptop and for a couple of extra quid a month from the iPhone as well. On the laptop I have the POP3 email account for work deliver into the Exchange Inbox automatically every hour (1). My inbox, contacts, calendars, tasks and folders are the same regardless of which machine I logon to and they contain all the mail that is relevant for day-to-day functioning, it’s my digital ‘Inbox’.

Going Mobile

Exchange and the iPhone play nice with each other so I have my email, calendar and contacts synced with the iPhone. However, the fly in the ointment is tasks, they aren’t synced at all.

This is where Toodledo steps in to save the day. Using the Toodledo web site, their iPhone application and the 3rd party Toodledo to Outlook sync tool (3) I get my tasks synced across to the mobile. That’s the full GTD experience on the iPhone, the home PC, the Tosh Lappy and the work Mac.

Bring on Live Mesh to close the Circle

Last but not least Live Mesh brings it all together enabling me to sync my reference folders with every machine (bar the iPhone at the moment, but maybe soon). I have word and excel templates, OneNote folders, research and reference ‘stuff’’ in these folders. I was totally blown away by how useful it is to have all this available, on the desktop of any machine I’m logged onto.

1. Work email received into Exchange Inbox
2. RDC into Windows 7 from the Mac
3. Toodledo to Outlook sync tool

And Finally…

I’ll say it again – if you regularly use more than one PC/Mac and there is any way you can afford it, get a hosted Exchange account, it will change your life! Live Mesh is free as is the Toodledo to Outlook sync tool. For the full Toodledo service there is a small cost ($30/year) and RDC for the Mac is Free.

Symptoms

I could go into the network pane and the server was visible, double click and an error would pop up “0×80070035 Network Path not found” Obviously it was found – the icon is clearly sat there!

What I Did First…

I messed around with the Samba setting on OS X Server, this had to be done at the command line because Apple don’t do UI’s for complex tasks. If they can’t make it look pretty then it’s “screw you dude your an your own, open Terminal”.

It didn’t work.

I messed around with the network settings on Windows 7. Turn IP6 off, tweak this, fiddle with that. Turn IP6 back on. Is the OS X box a WINS server? no! why not? Should it be? Could that be the problem, spend a while pissing around with that idea.

It didn’t work.

Check that DNS was working on OS X Server. Apparently if anything isn’t working on OS X Server it’s a problem with DNS.

DNS was fine.

Authentication, hmm, authentication, wait a minute AUTHENTICATION! What about OpenDirectory and Kerberos?

Nope and Nope!

…What I should have done

GOOGLE GOOGLE GOOGLE!

Now ok, the first path a Google led me down was bogus, it wasn’t a Firewall/Router issue on either machine, although that did look promising at the start. The actual solution took a bit of digging, it was a know problem for Vista but Windows 7 has added an extra sting in the tail.

Solutions

It turns out that Vista, by default, will only use NTLMv2 for authentication. OS X Leopard’s version of Samba doesn’t support this protocol. The fix is slightly different depending on your version of Windows.

NOTE: This downgrades Vista and Widows 7 security level when talking to Samba.

Vista Business & Ultimate

1. Click the start button
2. Type ‘secpol.msc’ in the Start Search box, when it finds it hit return.
3. Click Continue on the UAC prompt (your ARE still using UAC right )
4. On the left expand ‘Local Policy’ then select ‘Security Options’
5. In the list on the right scroll down to ‘Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level’
6. Double click and then change the drop down list to display ‘Send LM & NTLM responses – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated’
7. Click OK
8. Reboot, you should now be able to authenticate against OS X Server Leopard and Samba to access network shares.

Windows 7

With Windows 7 Microsoft have increases the baseline security level even further by default, so…

1. Click the start button
2. Type ‘secpol.msc’ in the Start Search box, when it finds it hit return.
3. Click Continue on the UAC prompt (your ARE still using UAC right )
4. On the left expand ‘Local Policy’ then select ‘Security Options’
5. In the list on the right scroll down to ‘Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level’
6. Double click and then change the drop down list to display ‘Send LM & NTLM responses – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated’
7. Click OK
8. In the list on the left find ‘Network Security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP Based (including secure RPC) Clients’ Uncheck ‘require 128bit’
9. Click OK
10. Reboot, you should now be able to authenticate against OS X Server Leopard and Samba to access network shares.

Vista Home & Home Premium

Neither of these versions of windows have the Local Security Policy snap-in, so we need to take a trip into the registry.

NOTE: All the standard warnings apply: Backup your registry, be very careful, the world may end if you do something wrong, it defiantly isn’t my fault if you hose your system – It works on my machine.

1. Click the Start Button
2. Type ‘regedit.exe’ in the Start Search box, when it’s found hit return.
3. Click Continue on the UAC prompt
4. Carefully negotiate your way to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlLsa
5. In the list on the right double click ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’ type 1 and press enter.
6. Close the Registry Editor.
7. Reboot, you should now be able to authenticate against OS X Server Leopard and Samba to access network shares.

Google Food

A few versions of what I searched for to hopefully make this easy to find.

• Error code 0×80070035
• Cannot access OS X Leopard Shares from Vista
• Cannot access OS X Leopard Shares from Windows 7
• Cannot see OS Leopard Server in Network Browser on Vista
• Vista authentication problems against OS X Server
• Networking OS X Server and Vista.

…And Finally

Let’s not have MS bashing please, you know, “MS are just spitting their dummy out and making it hard to talk to Macs…”, “Why haven’t MS made this easier…”, or anything with dollar sign in it.

NTLMv2 is an inherently more secure protocol and the blame here falls squarely on Apple inc. for not supporting it. It took a fair bit of digging around to find the solution, and it was, in the main, Microsoft staff and Vista users who supplied the information. I honestly don’t know if the Apple Support site talks about the problem or offers a solution, mainly because the site is a joke, search results are non-existent or totally irrelevant. Its time you sorted your stall out Apple Chaps.

I have just 2GB of RAM installed at the moment (should have been 4GB but the supplier screwed up) but even so 4 minutes is a long time!

I was going to just do a clean install of Vista Business, but the lack of installation media because it’s an OEM copy meant that would be a pain in the arse. So I thought I’d jump right in and stick Windows 7 Beta on there and see how things work out. I’ll try and keep a decent log of how I get on and any bug reports I file to MS on this blog, filed under the ‘Windows 7‘ tag.

So onto Report 1:

The install went very smoothly, a little over 40 minutes and I was up and running with very little effort at all. The installer ran straight from a double-click in Vista with the large portion of the happening before a re-boot occurred. I can’t remember if this was the case when I fresh installed from XP to Vista but in any event it’s very slick and a +1 for usability.

A nice clean OS installed and ready to go – time to check the boot-up speed. Again from cold it took just 1 minute 20 seconds to arrive at a fully usable desktop! OK, it’s no instant-on OS, but it’s one hell of a lot better than before.

Today I received a brand new Toshiba Satellite-Pro U400, primarily to run Office. We are exclusively Mac at work and I just can’t live with Office for Mac – and iWork, well, enough said!

Said laptop comes licensed with Vista Business (OEM), no disk, no lovely curved box just a slip of paper that tells you how to burn a DVD and a hidden partition on the HD that eats away a chunk of the available 120Gb.

But worse still was the crapware that gets pre-installed without even a by your leave. After an excruciating first start up that kicked in a multitude of installers I ended up with, and this is on a brand new machine;

• 11 Taskbar process plus the battery, wifi, speaker and clock.
• 14 desktop shortcuts plus the Recycle Bin
• 2 additional Sidebar widgets
• 6 additions to the Welcome Screen

…and a system that takes 4 minutes to boot to the desktop.

Toshiba – FAIL

After due consideration, and parting with $50 I figured it was high time I rationalised my storage. It would be far better to store my 70Gb of data on WHS instead of my client PC, I could then access it from any machine in the house/office as well as from anywhere I have access to a web browser – pretty neat and very convenient.

So after coping all the data across to a shiny new ‘Jobs’ folder I downloaded the software, installed it on WHS and set up the relevant folders to backup. Set and forget that’s the beauty of Carbonite, stress levels still at an acceptably low level, smugness factor, well, pretty damn high actually…

…until that is I remote desktop into the WHS to setup a new share just yesterday. On the surface everything looks all kittens and picnics, the little Carbonite icon in the task bar is reassuringly green to let me know everything is fine*, so I move on and do my business. Just as I’m about to logout I get a phone call and I need to reference a file in the Jobs folder I’m still RD’d in so start digging through the files on the server box and every single file and folder has an orange Carbonite dot, NOT a good sign.

After finishing my call I start investigating the problem, a simple right click shows that the ‘file is pending backup when accessible due to permissions’. That’s every single file in my backup path, I HAVE NO BACKUP!

Time for a Google search.

Abridged version: I’m stuffed.

Detailed version: Carbonite doesn’t directly support WHS although it does apparently work if all your storage is on internal drives. The killer is they don’t support external drives (on any OS) and the big advantage of WHS is that you just keep plugging in USB drives and WHS sees them all as one great big lump of Gigabytes.

So it’s time to look at other options and so far JungleDisk is coming out on top, more expensive but it directly supports WHS and it backs up to Amazon S3 which is up there on the ‘trust’ stakes.

*You can’t blame Carbonite for not working on my particular setup, the details are there if you actually read them but the FAIL: in my view is that the task bar icon stayed green.

The main account I’ve been using over the years was a Totalise address (now Madasafish). Some time ago this had swapped from being a pretty good free service to a pretty bad paid service, the operator had been bought out and frankly isn’t worth the (small) monthly fee. However, I’ve had that address for so long, and signed up to so many mailing lists, web sites and forums that simply cutting it dead isn’t really an option. As the the current provider doesn’t offer an Exchange service or a mail forwarding option I needed a different approach.

After a little casting around I settled on thinkgrid, they offer a single Exchange account for just £8.00 a month. The pre-sales guys were really helpful and even after I’d handed over the cash the support was excellent. The only downside is thinkgrid don’t offer remote POP3 polling, if you know of an Exchange provider that does I’d love to hear from you – I couldn’t find one.

I thought I was dead in the water at this point and would have to run at least one POP3 account alongside the Exchange mailbox. However as it turns out it was Gmail to the rescue. It’s possible to poll any POP3 account and retrieve mail directly into your Gmail inbox. Then to finish off the process Gmail offers mail forwarding, so with 2 hops I can forward the totalise mail and my Google mail to the new Exchange account.

So now with a combination of the Gmail technique and simple forwarding I’m collecting all mail into a single inbox that has all the great features of exchange. I can access my mail from any machine I work on, this includes all the folders I’ve setup to file mail.

Push email on my iPhone:

This costs an extra couple of pounds a month but boy it’s worth it! Battery life is a bit down on the 3G iPhone but I still get a day out of the battery and I’m rarely that far from a way to charge it.

Getting all my regular contacts to use the odd-uk.com email address won’t be a problem, so the next phase is swapping all the online accounts. Six months should be long enough to find all the places my old email address is used that I really want to stay signed up with, then I can switch off all the other accounts one by one. Email heaven

Getting yourself connected with an MS Exchange email account is now so cheap, and the productivity gains so great, it’s something you really should be investigating.

"Leave Startup Alone

Your app might be the centre of your world developing day and night – it’s not the centre of mine."

Damien’s also put together a lovely monospaced (fixed-width) font for programmers, Envy Code R, which can be downloaded here. As well as  regular and bold variants the font includes a full italic version too and the obligatory italic-as-bold hack to get italic syntax highlighting in Visual Studio. There is also a registry hack (for Windows) that allows you to use the font at your command prompt.  

But you don’t just have to take my word for it, they also come highly recommended by Scott Hanselman.

I have to say I’m very impressed, I’m not a big fan of hosted apps but Basecamp is quick, very simple to pick up and has just the right amount of features all very well implimented. 

A definate 9/10.