Architecture – ASP.Net MVC 3: multiple versions of the site without changing of URL, is it possible

I haven't worked much with MVC, however I have worked a lot with MVVM and here's my take on it:

Question, Answer, and User are all data objects. Its OK for them to know of each other, but they should not be aware of anything outside of the data object layer, such as Views, Controllers, ViewModels, etc.

In an ideal world, your View only references the Models. They might know of the Controller, but they shouldn't have to reference it directly. The ViewModel only knows of other Models. The Controller knows about Models and ViewModels. It doesn't care about the View at all, even though it supplies the View with ViewModels or Models.

So your objects end up looking like this:

• M odels come in two varieties: Models and ViewModels.

  • Models are simple data objects that simply exist to hold data, and are generally a reflection of database data. They do not access the database or contain any sort of business logic that is unrelated to them.
  • ViewModels are data objects that contain data that the View needs, not necessarily what the database needs. They can contain Models, although Models should not contain ViewModels.

• C ontrollers contain your business logic. They control the data access calls, creating Models/ViewModels to pass to the View, advanced business logic such as permissions, etc. They basically control the entire code layer.

• V iews are just used to give the users a user-friendly interface. They accept either a ViewModel or Model, and display it in some way that looks nice to the user.

I would first have a centralized class that is used for the app to register compiled modules with a static constructor and a static member List of modules that were in the system. The modules would have a static property indicating if its a menu item or not and what order it should appear in the menu.

Each module would have its own static constructor that would note itself in the centralized class that keeps track of modules.

Think of this system more like a time clock system where employees come in and clock in. Then at payroll time, we know to pay all the employees based on who clocked in, etc.

Reflection could also be used if you have an interface contract on the modules they must inherit from that ties meta property info to it.

I worked for Warner Brothers Music and did an internal music processing system for different encoding formats. I made a generic plugin model for encoding with reflection that used inheritance so it could be typecast with reflection to get the basic meta properties of the class. I have not tried using a static centralized class though. Just kind of thought of that randomly as another way to try for fun.

I would also add that I've used MVC serving multiple clients with a baseline of requirement but with also enhanced features similar to what you are trying to do. Instead I converted the MVC into using App_Code rather than requiring a compile. Its easier to push files out this way without needing a centralized compilation.

You can leverage JIT with simple FTP or GIT push rather than needing to compile locally and push DLLs around.

Here is a link to that article on stack overflow