A little while ago, Scott Guthrie introduced the ASP.NET MVC framework, you can read my initial post on the topic here. Well, today I read Scott’s next ASP.NET MVC post, and holy crap the ASP.NET MVC framework looks awesome!

What would the MVC framework do for SpellDamage? I hinted at it in my previous post, but an MVC framework enables some seriously cool features.

First, the native URL routing is simply perfect for my type of application. The URL routing in an MVC framework maps controllers to actions. A template of what a URL would look like in a MVC SpellDamage.com is this, www.spelldamage.com/<class>/<name>/<realm>/<continent>. There would be a controller for the <class> and the other parts would be variables into that controller. The controller would then call on the appropriate view to render the HTML to the visitor.

Second, AJAX! Now, I know… to most AJAX alone means diddly. And, in the world of ASP.NET AJAX it’s generally done wrong simply because the UpdatePanel control is horribly inefficient. But the MVC framework fixes that and allows for smoother calls to ASP.NET AJAX to update only the portions of the page that need to be, severely reducing the amount of traffic to the web server (in turn, increasing performance for the visitor).

Last, but certainly not least, fast, clean, efficient pages. In the MVC model, things like session state, view state, control IDs, etc… are not generated. Only elegant, clean, efficient HTML code is emitted to the browser. In the postback model, there is a ton of extra crap that gets generated into the output to the browser (increasing page size, reducing performance).

In closing, porting SpellDamage to the MVC framework makes perfect sense to me. If MS holds true to their deadline, I should have the MVC framework in my grubby mitts in a few weeks. After that, a quick port to the framework, workout some of the kinks, rework a bit of code, and voila! SpellDamage 2.0 MVC’d!