I started building a web site for my father a few years ago, back then I based it on PHP/MySQL. After some time I discovered Ruby on Rails and rebuilt most of the system using RoR, although I didn't complete the project for a few reasons (not going into detail here). Late 2007 I started to thinking about rebuilding it and leaned toward using .NET. I was thinking I could use it to try out some new technologies in .NET that I hadn't used yet. I'm not a big fan of ASP.NET, so using traditional ASP.NET was out of the question. Since I'm used to PHP and using POST/GET and reading query strings etc I feel that ASP.NET actually confuses developers with postbacks, events and viewstates causing all sorts of problems. Another issue of ASP.NET is the testability, it's cumbersome to write unit tests for ASP.NET applications, it's possible for example using a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern.

Looking for another web framework to use I found Monorail, which is a MVC framework by Castle Project inspired by ActionPack. It's built on top of ASP.NET but, everything gets routed to an action on a controller. I also discovered ASP.NET MVC, however, it was so early that it felt like it changed a lot between every preview, big breaking changes which would meant fixing a lot of code whenever upgrading to a newer preview. That's way I settled with Monorail for the time being.

The web application that was built had the following features

• Membership (Users, groups and permissions)
• CMS (pages and menus)
• Questionnaire
• Create conference and have members registering to attend
• Create, send as PDF and manage invoices (the sum of the invoices for the last conference was close to $350 000)
• Post job advertisements
• Forum

The web framework used was Monorail and for data access I used NHibernate with ActiveRecord, which made my life so much easier. It's incredible powerful to be able to re-create the database with just a command and be able to switch between different databases by only changing the configuration. At one time I developed the application on my development machine which had a SQL 2005 server and I deployed to a MySQL server and it worked right out of the box. I used the ability to destroy and create the database a lot when creating integration tests. No need to try to reset the database to a specific state, now I was confident that everything was exactly the same each time I ran the tests. The database got swiped and created between each test. There's also the possibility to use an in memory database such as SQLite for performing integration tests, since it only resides in memory it's incredible fast.

I'm pretty pleased with the outcome of the system, it's working great and it's easy to add new features. But, I'm like many of you, I always want to try new things and learn more. Now when ASP.NET MVC has had almost a full year of development since I last visited it I feel like it's time for doing another re-build of the system. This time I'm hoping to be able to re-use some of the business logic and a lot of the data access layer since I'm still going to use NHibernate. I know Entity Framework (EF) has been released, but it's lacking a lot of features and is at the moment inferior to NHibernate. I'm sure it will turn out great when version 2 is released of EF, and I'll probably replace the data access layer when it's out :)

Looking through the code for the web application today trying to look for what needs to be replaced when moving over to ASP.NET MVC from Monorail, it feels like it's not really that much that needs to be changed. I could use a NVelocity view engine keeping the views more or less intact. The data layer is the same and since I wrapped everything in services the controller does not really contain a lot of logic, it'll certainly help. However, obviously there are some core differences between Monorail and ASP.NET MVC. I'm going to go over the issues I encounter one by one as I browse through the code looking for certain perks that needs to either be rewritten in ASP.NET MVC or could just be moved over simply by renaming some classes etc. I'm really looking forward to try out the new features in ASP.NET MVC that I haven't looked at yet, particularly that controller action is not void anymore, instead they return an object. This will make unit testing so much easier.