I just recently started looking at the ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. I like the inherent benefits of the architectural isolation or decoupling of the business logic from the user interface – always been a fan of separating the Presentation Layer (in this case, View) from the Business Logic Layer (in this case, Controller) and of course the Data Access Layer (in this case, Model).

MVC has been around for a few years; however the ASP.NET MVC pattern is relatively new. Scott Gu’s recent blog posts examines ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. You have to check it out. ASP.NET MVC also supports any data layer abstraction including some of my favorite ORMs –SubSonic, NHibernate, LINQ to SQL, etc. I can picture a few scenarios where the MVC pattern will prove to be useful however, since MSFT plans on supporting both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms you really don’t have to make a move to MVC, unless its development style comes natural to you.

Unless the entire development team is comfortable with and willing to get on board with MVC, your adoption of MVC will probably introduce some complexities in code maintenance. It is probably not suitable for relatively smaller web projects where code reuse is not a huge concern. Arguably, one of the core benefits of MVC is its support of the Test-Driven Development (TDD) workflow. It makes unit testing quite easy and promotes scalability, code re-use and better code organization.

Interested in ASP.NET MVC?

Check out:

• Scott Hanselman’s Intro to MVC [Video]
• CodePlex code repository
• Scott Guthrie’s Blog on ASP.NET MVC
• Phil Haack on the future of ASP.NET MVC
• Videos and more on ASP.NET MVC