All of my .Net experience, until relatively recently, has been Winforms.  Over the past 12 to 18 months I have done a bit of WPF, but Winforms is still my bread and butter.

Early this year I picked up a new client. That itself was surprising. I thought in these troubled economic times that I might be struggling to find new work. But I happened to be recommended by the right person at the right time and I was asked to do a winforms project. Every developer knows that some projects go well, and some go badly. This one went well at every step. The client was pleased with the result and the application was deployed ahead of time.

It could have gone the other way. I could have run into unforseen problems and had an application that didn’t meet expectations delivered late. And then I wouldn’t have been asked to do any more work for them. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, and I have now done half a dozen winforms applications for this client.

Last week they asked me if I could do a simple ASP.Net application. I haven’t looked at ASP.Net in the last 6 or so years. When I first moved to .NET after a number of years programming windows in Visual Basic from version 3 to version 6, and dabbling in C++ along the way, I went through qutie a few tutorials and so I got a taste of ASP.Net. I haven’t looked at it since.

So I said I would brush up on it and see it went. Today I received the initial specs for the application.

I have spent the last three of four days brushing up on ASP.Net, and I have had a close look at ASP.Net MVC. I like the idea of MVC. I have read qutie a few blog posts which have described the good, the bad and the ugly of Microsoft’s implementation of MVC. But until now I haven’t used it in anger.

When I do Winforms applications I often use Model View Presenter. In WPF I have been looking at MVVM, and I am currently working on a project that will use it for the first time.

Whether ASP.Net MVC is the right way to go, I can’t say. I don’t have enough experience. But it does look, on the face of it, a better approach than standard ASP.Net. So I think I will try that and see what happens.