Microsoft's new MVC web development framework

I've just watched the funeral of Web Forms. On Scott Hanselman's blog is a video of ScottGu presenting an initial prototype of Microsoft's new MVC rails-a-like web development framework at the ALT.NET conference. Gone is the event driven, postback, impossible to test old Web Forms. I guess Microsoft would have had to have had it's collective head buried firmly in the sand not have been closely watching all the excitement surrounding rails and more recently MonoRail, both of which were heavily name checked by Scott during his presentation. The framework has some very neat stuff that heavily leverages many of the new language features of C# 3.0 such as lambda expressions and anonymous types. Scott was particularly keen to show off the rather nice URL processor that makes it very easy to do SEO. It still uses the aspx templating engine for the views, so it will support all the nice wysiwyg support as well as the AJAX update panel stuff. Also nice is the way that it supports IoC containers and dependency injection.

Someone in the audience asked how Microsoft will be positioning this vis-a-vis Web Forms. He said that it wasn't a replacement for Web Forms, which will still be supported, but the enterprise development message will be to use the new framework. I expect Web Forms will share a similar fate to the Dataset, gradually melting away as one by one us Morts get the message. Probably around 4 years.