Andy Butland

With its clean model for separation of concerns, one of the things I’ve been impressed by in use of MVC with ASP.Net is the support for building AJAX enabled applications that support progressive enhancement. This technique takes the traditional strategy of graceful degradation in web design and turns it on its head. Rather than focussing on having the best possible user interface degrade to a less rich but still workable and presentable one, the focus is on creating a functional base UI that is enhanced by the addition of CSS and JavaScript to produce an improved user experience for those that can make use of it. Of course either method can lead to the same result, but – in addition to the use of some specific techniques such as external referencing of assets to avoid swamping the more basic client with code or data that can’t be used – the change of approach leads to a different design mindset and result that better supports the full user base. In this post I’ll illustrate a sma

Following my previous post looking at options on the use of view models within ASP.Net MVC , where I came down on the side of using a simpler approach passing domain models to views directly, in this blog post I'll outline the approach I'm taking with more recent project - where I've changed my approach to create view models and form models that wrap the domain model and can include additional fields and options that may be required in the particular view. The argument for using custom view models is that they can be tailored precisely to each strongly typed view, providing a cleaner approach for display and updating data from views. The downside though is that there is some additional work involved. However, after further reading on the subject - would recommend both Steve Michelotti's post on MVC view model patterns and Jorit Salverda's maintainable MVC series - on balance now I've been using them more and more on projects, it seems the extra steps are