First look at Monorail..

I might be behind the times a little bit but for various different reasons I have delved back into the world of MVC for ASP.NET with Monorail - an open source framework which runs on top of C# and ASP.NET. It strikes me as a very similar way to approaching web development as using Smarty - a templating language for use with PHP. Simple, easy to understand the logic between the code and the html.

The things I like about Monorail straight off the bat is that it sets up a treat. I'm presuming this wasn't always the case as I've seen quite a few people complaining that the set up was quite time consuming (having to manually add settings in the Web.config file) but this was all done automatically straight from the downloaded .msi file when I installed it.

Once Monorail is set up it's a pretty normal MVC set-up, folders in the right place, css/js files in a separate folder but no WebForms... No server controls... No view intellisense. For most ASP.NET programmers - this would be a complete turn off - having to learn something new especially if you've been doing ASP.NET for a long time. I, on the other hand, like the way you can control the way the code comes out and I feel that the way that Monorail is set up is very similar how a good PHP project should be. This means the transitioning from PHP to Monorail is pretty straight forward. Especially when I've always been a fan of Ruby on Rails.

Whilst Monorail doesn't have the ease of routing rules, intellisense or server side controls that the new MS MVC framework does, the fact that you can use it without installing ASP.NET 3.5 on the hosting server and you can use it with Visual Studio 2005 means it will fit straight into current web hosting setups people/companies use. The MS MVC bits (part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions) are still just a community technology preview which again makes Monorail a more desirable option at present. I do see that in the future where 3.5 is more common place on servers, the MS MVC bits will have aged and grown over time (hopefully with migrations!) and then Monorail will need to pull something out of the bag to stop people from switching over to the Microsoft supported MVC Framework.

What are your views?