Today I had a rare opportunity.

An old, terribly designed classic ASP site was falling apart, and it was our job to re-build it. No pressing deadline, so it’s something we can plan, research, and, most importantly we can have some fun with.

The client has a Windows-based server, under tight security regulations. Because of this, PHP (and to a certain extent, non-Microsoft) software was basically out of the question. Since we were limited to IIS & ASP, and the site wasn’t mission-critical, we decided to try something new and exciting: ASP.NET MVC 3.0.

Firing up my Windows VM, I became re-acquainted Visual Studio, and set-up a new project with the framework.

At first glance? “Yeah. This is going to be good.”

It seems pretty straightforward, but it’s going to take some getting used to. Working for so long with PHP has a tendency to destroy the part of the brain that can deal with “normal” strongly-typed programming languages and design patterns. An hour or two in, I’m falling back into a rhythm. Visual Studio makes coding child’s play. There are so many components that are auto-generated, and even more can be tab-completed. By the end of the day, and with a little help from my colleague Karl Romanowski (thanks Karl!) I have a working set of models, and data being displayed by the views.

So far, this is going to be a project to remember, and hopefully, it will prove the advantages using such a cutting-edge development framework.