With each preview release of Asp.Net MVC, I’ve had quite a few issues to resolve.  Most of these were well documented and I was able to resolve them by reading the release notes and the upgrade instructions.  Unfortunately, Beta is a little different.  

Blame it on Apple

I’ve been iPhone bound for a while.  I skipped Preview 5.  I would have caught this issue then and probably avoided the problem that I am currently facing as I believe we wrote most of this code after the Preview 5 drop.  Thanks alot, Apple, for making iPhone development so freakin’ cumbersome!

Rendering Partial Views

One of the features of Asp.Net MVC that I absolutely LOVED was the ability to render a user control to a string and then mess with that html.  Seriously, that capability was incredibly valuable.  Brad Wilson decided to axe it.  He had a Microsoft-typical attitude that he should change the code to restrict the consumer into following his pattern for use rather than leaving it open as it was before.  Yes, Brad, I am angry with you right now…

Listed incorrectly as an added feature…

• Added support for rendering partial views. You have several options for passing view data to the partial view. The partial view can be rendered by a different view engine than the containing view. Usage is <% Html.RenderPartial(…); %>. This method does not return a string, but instead renders to the TextWriter instance of the underlying response.

Here’s what I had before (yes, I could render partials before):

HtmlContent.AppendLine(

    Html.RenderUserControl( 

        "~/Views/Components/Charts/RatingReturnChart.ascx", 

        this.ViewData.Model, 

        new { Weighted = true, CurrentTimePeriod = requestedTimePeriod }

    )

);

After the html was rendered, it was passed to another control that accepted a string for "other stuff" that it wasn’t responsible for.  There are other ways to solve this problem but this was something that was easy and didn’t violate our desire to keep separate concerns, separate.

Now the damn thing uses the TextWriter attached to the response object.  So much for extensibility and object oriented programming.  Let’s hardwire into the response object, just like webforms.  Nice work, Brad.  Love it.  Great.  Now I have to create a user control and move my page logic into the control because I can’t define my own context and behavior.  Just like webforms.  Hey, are you going to insert view state and post-back on your next big brain storm?  That’ll be swell. 

Back to the drawing board

Where did I put that Rails Recipes book?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Asp.Net, Mvc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.