At least in Microsoft world, the MVC pattern is back in fashion. Note that I say back and not finally. Bashing Microsoft is popular and many I’m sure believe that the move towards the MVC is just trend following, but it’s not entirely.

If you did any serious programming during nineties in C++ on Windows, you have most likely used MFC. From the very beginning MFC had MVC pattern, albeit a bit weird (it wasn’t clear is the Frame was supposed to be a controller or not). This presents a bit of a challenge for the newcomers as it’s yet another conceptual thing they have to struggle with but pays off in the long run because even rookies write relatively sane structured code from the beginning.

MVC is suspiciously absent from all three major versions of the .NET Framework and I can’t really say why. Without this foundation, most .NET apps end up a mess, or just a group of Forms with scattered business logic, DAL and view mashed up together. There is no excuse for this and I’m really disappointed in this decision.

Good for us though, thanks to the popularity of other frameworks/libraries that do use MVC or simply because MVC proponents in Microsoft finally had their voice heard (or both, or something else entirely) we’ll be (relatively) soon getting MVC for desktop and web development on the .NET platform!

Project Acropolis is bringing MVC into the desktop world (WPF oriented, but supposedly can be bolted on the Winforms as well). Just a couple of days ago Scott Guthrie demonstrated the ASP.NET MVC  framework in a surprisingly low-key way during the ALT.NET conference (video of crapish quality but watchable is available here, thanks to Scott Hanselman).

The web framework is quite a bit like Ruby on Rails, but that’s to be expected as RoR is well thought out framework. Thanks to the DLR the new ASP.NET MVC framework will most likely be immediately usable from Python and Ruby too. Great times.