Asp.net-mvc – ASP.NET MVC reminds me of old Classic ASP spaghetti code

asp-classicasp.net-mvccoding-styleview

I just went through some MVC tutorials after checking this site out for a while. Is it just me, or does MVC View pages bring back HORRIBLE flashbacks of Classic ASP spaghetti code with all the jumping in and out of HTML and ASP.NET with yellow delimiters everywhere making it impossible to read? What ever happened to the importance of code/design separation?? I was really sold on the new technology until the tutorials hit the View page development section.

Or am I missing something? (And don't say you can use the template to help because it's jsut moving the spaghetti to another location – sweeps it under the rug – it doesn't fix the problem)

Best Answer

see Jeff's post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001155.html) which echoes your question, and Rob Conery's response (http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/asp-net-mvc-avoiding-tag-soup/)

In summary, ASP.NET MVC gives developers the choice of shooting themselves in the foot, although it's certainly possible to do it cleanly. As such, it is suited for developers who are comfortable with web development and have a clean style, but it is not for the developers who want Widgetized behavior a la winforms without having to delve too deeply into the markup.

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to create a dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common