MVC Contrib Now Offers 4 Alternative View Engines

Posted by Hartmut Wilms on Feb 13, 2008

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MVC ,

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MVC Contrib, a contribution project for the ASP.NET MVC framework hosted on CodePlex, now offers 4 alternatives to the default ASPX view engine.

Although the ASP.NET MVC framework is just a preview, several community members have invested lots of time and energy in the MVC Contrib project. MVC Contrib provides additional functionality and alternatives to several extensibility and plugin points within ASP.NET MVC:

• Alternative View Engines
• View Helpers
• Data Binding
• IoC Container Controller Factories
• Castle Windsor
• Object Builder
• Spring.NET
• Structure Map
• Alternative Routing
• Simply RESTful Routing
• Alternative Base Controllers
• Convention Controller
• Visual Studio Code Snippets
• Resharper Live Templates

Jeffrey Palermo gives an overview of the four alternative view engines:

• Brail.  The Brail view engine from MonoRail has been ported to ASP.NET MVC and added to MvcContrib.  This view engine lives in MonoRail, but with MvcContrib, it can now be used with ASP.NET MVC Framework controllers.  Ported by Bill Pierce.
• NHaml.  Contributed by Andrew Peters.  NHaml provides an internal DSL for XHTML. 
• NVelocity.  Adapted by Hammet and added to MvcContrib with permission.
• XSLT.  Contributed by Ivan Porto.

He is also planning to contribute SmartBag, which is a nice trade-off between type-safety and flexibility, for passing objects from the controller to the view.

In addition to providing lots of functionality the MVC Contrib project is a proof of Scott Guthrie's claim that everything "in the MVC framework is designed so that it can be easily replaced/customized".

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