Connecticut Code Camp Follow-up

This past week-end I attended Connecticut’s first Code Camp which went great! Code Camps are an ideal place to recharge batteries, gain new ideas and simply interact with like-minded geeks. Only enthusiasts will drive across two states, on a week-end, on their own dime to attend a free-for-all geek fest.

Code Camps have very liberal agendas. For example, John Zablocki gave an interesting talk on how he designed Jeopardy Story with everything open-source: MySQL and Catle’s MonoRail and ActiveRecord. His presentation has re-ignited my interest to MonoRail. Something just clicked right there. I’m no big fan of ActiveRecord, SubSonic, and CSLA though. In my opinion, mixing persistence right into the domain model eventually leads to some pretty ugly mess, so I’m taking a good look at NHibernate (again).

Oh wait, open source is un-American. I gotta reevaluate my position.

Why wait for Microsoft’s MVC framework?

Microsoft is very, very late to the MVC / MVP party. The terror of view state, server controls and postbacks has reigned for too long. There’s no need to sit and wait for the MVC framework.

It will truly get validated only if it plays nicely with existing frameworks. We’ll be able to gauge its relevance when we see if Microsoft tries to change the methodology to fit the tool, as they often do. Anyone remembers the infamous TDD “guidance”? (Hint: it’s not ’obsolete’. It went fubar.)