mca blog

i really admire Phil Haack's efforts to talk publicly about the twists and turns that are the ASP.NET MVC library. it's nice to see this kind of transparency from MS while they build a new Web developer library.

this post points out, IMHO, the pitfalls of trying to make things really easy for devs. MS has a habit of making things "just work" "auto-magically" and sometimes that comes back to haunt you. like this time.

they decided to allow the URI to directly route to methods within the server-side class. that meant you could have a URI like this: http://example.org/users/list that would call the List method of the Users class. never mind that this kind of thing is bad when it comes to proper URI construction, REST, etc. the idea is cool. it reduces the need for lots of messy routing (and the maintenance there of) and makes it quite and easy to build apps.

you can check the post for details but, to sum it all up, things took a bad turn after some 'minor changes' in the design pattern. personally, i think their error was in trying to make it 'too easy' for devs. now they need to unwind things a bit and - as a result - may have added more complexity to the implementation. i understand the desire to make things all peachy for devs, but sometimes you need to bite the bullet and get your hands dirty with details.