I responded to a post in one of the Microsoft newsgroups the other day where someone asked "Is MVC a good pattern to use and should I port my old implementation of it to my new C# application" (I am paraphrasing here).
The answer is; Yes, MVC is a great pattern and NO! don't port it. it's built in to .NET. They just call it databinding.
When pattens became popular in the 90's I was working as a team lead in Stingray's C++ development department and I remember long and fraught discussions about the MVC pattern because my boss saw MVC as somthing that worked on a macro level, the whole view, the whole model and the whole controller. I on the other hand imagined MVC as a light and super granular pattern that only really applied well to individual controls or bits of data. Because he was the boss, Stingray went on to provide an MVC implementation that worked well enough but that encouraged hefty logic built into views and complex interactions with data that sort of spoiled the simplicity and grace of my MVC vision.
Looking at the world now I feel vindicated because databinding is indeed granular and simple and, as I mention in my previous post, is the only thing that Microsoft have really retained between Windows Forms and WPF.
I strongly advise that you don't fall into the trap of trying to reimplement MVC on a .NET platform. I saw an example of this just a short while ago when a very competent and sane C++ programmer was given the thankless task of porting an old C++ program that implemented Stingray's MVC pattern to C#. He spent weeks messing with it and then was disturbed to discover that all that effort could have been avoided with a few simple lines of databinding code.
The answer is; Yes, MVC is a great pattern and NO! don't port it. it's built in to .NET. They just call it databinding.
When pattens became popular in the 90's I was working as a team lead in Stingray's C++ development department and I remember long and fraught discussions about the MVC pattern because my boss saw MVC as somthing that worked on a macro level, the whole view, the whole model and the whole controller. I on the other hand imagined MVC as a light and super granular pattern that only really applied well to individual controls or bits of data. Because he was the boss, Stingray went on to provide an MVC implementation that worked well enough but that encouraged hefty logic built into views and complex interactions with data that sort of spoiled the simplicity and grace of my MVC vision.
Looking at the world now I feel vindicated because databinding is indeed granular and simple and, as I mention in my previous post, is the only thing that Microsoft have really retained between Windows Forms and WPF.
I strongly advise that you don't fall into the trap of trying to reimplement MVC on a .NET platform. I saw an example of this just a short while ago when a very competent and sane C++ programmer was given the thankless task of porting an old C++ program that implemented Stingray's MVC pattern to C#. He spent weeks messing with it and then was disturbed to discover that all that effort could have been avoided with a few simple lines of databinding code.
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