Introduction

In the spring of 2006, I had the privilege of taking a very early look at what would eventually become ASP.NET MVC. Scott Guthrie of Microsoft arranged a personal demo just for me backstage at the DevConnections conference in balmy Nice, France. At the time, I had just started playing with ASP.NET Web Forms and the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern. I expected to see the usual great set of designers to automatically define models, controllers, and views. Instead, I was surprised to see a brand-new application model being worked out on top of the same ASP.NET runtime. (Note that what I saw at that time was at best a distant relative to what you know today as ASP.NET MVC, but the key facts were already visible.)

Not that getting rid of the postback model looked like a bad thing to me, but frankly the idea of changing the programming model quite significantly didn’t impress me that much. The combination of ASP.NET Web Forms and MVP seemed to me a more natural and less disruptive way to achieve separation of concerns and overall better quality code. Scott pointed me to a couple of team members that I pinged a few times during the summer for more information and newer builds. But nothing happened. Instead, in the summer of 2006 all the excitement being generated was for the upcoming ASP.NET AJAX Extensions (remember Atlas?). Overwhelmed by the AJAX bandwagon, I gravitated to this clear sentiment: that funky ASP.NET MVC thing was just a proof of concept, a good-for-fun project. So I removed it from my mind.

In October 2007, I was in Malaga, Spain, to make a presentation to a local user group. During a break, my friend Hadi Hariri asked my opinion about the just-released, first preview of