integerate ASP.NET AJAX with MVC

[Welliam]

Hi
I am learning MVC now and I am looking for any info on how to integrate telerik ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight controls in an MVC view .

Thanks

[Shane Milton]

I would strongly discourage you from trying to integrate the ASP.NET AJAX controls in there since they depend heavily on session state but this is turned off in MVC. As for Silverlight, this should work identically to including Silverlight controls in any other web application.

[Welliam]

Many Thanks

Please tell me :

- Is MVC mature enough to start to use in big web application ? or use web forms better?
  --  In case of MVC is it possible to use EXT JS with it ? how ?
- What is the shortest way to learn using telerik silverlight ?

Thanks alot
 

[Shane Milton]

My answers:

MVC may or may not be mature enough for you. You need to learn more about it to figure this out for yourself. I STRONGLY encourage you to perform the NerdDinner tutorial as a step 1 and then apply all MVC v2 features to the finished product as a step 2. After you've done this, you will be better-informed to make this decision. We adopted it as our standard platform for our very large enterprise system (125+ tables in the database, 150 million records in some tables) with the caveat that we will need to make some sacrifices in some of the flashy "pretty" areas. However, you need to become more knowledgable about the technology before you adopt it - I cannot make this decision for you.

EXT JS should work. I've never done it before but since it's just a javascript library, it should work. I don't think you can trigger MVC to invoke it without you writing some code to hook it up, but it should work just fine. Integration would probably be done via your master page, but again, I really don't know anything about EXT JS so I can't say for sure. Again, I suggest you attempt the NerdDinner tutorial and in this case, integrate EXT JS into it to learn about this.

I'm no Silverlight wiz myself. Go check out www.silverlight.net - there's a TON of info there. And once you know Silverlight well, then go check out Telerik's Silverlight demos. You can download the trial there which gives you the source code for the demo. There are also lots of help pages. You can also learn a tremendous amount by searching through the forums here (but go check out the Silverlight forums since this is the MVC forum).

Hope this helps!

[Welliam]

Thanks , but my problem is I have very limited time to decide which technology to use what you advise will take at least a month of study

is that the tutorial you mean ?
http://nerddinnerbook.s3.amazonaws.com/Intro.htm

thanks

[Shane Milton]

Yes, that's the tutorial I mean. It took me about 12 hours to get through it completely with a perfectly functioning result and I learned a large amount. However, realize that this is just an introduction tutorial and they do not use best practices for things like dependency injection, unit testing, and such.

As for my recommendation, if you do not have the time to evaluate MVC properly, then I would recommend you not use it. Instead, I would recommend ASP.NET instead of MVC simply because if you don't have time to evaluate the technology, then you will probably not have the time to learn it well enough to become efficient with it. There is an up-front learning curve that you'll have to get through. However, once you get past that, it is much easier to do many things. However, you also don't have the TONS of mature third-party controls to use like ASP.NET has, so it does come with a tradeoff.

-Shane

[Welliam]

Thanks
About the controls using telerik silverlight controls along with jquery and maybe ext js is more than enough and they can be combined together , right ?

I also spent the previous week on following tutorials for MVC 2.0 and yes it need time to learn which bring important question, is it really can reduce development time significantly ?

sorry for many questions :)

[MikeK]

Here's my two cents opinion, for what it's worth. I manage 3 other developers and am the system architect for our organization. We have 900 employees throughout the state with sites spanning the entire state. I have over 20 in-house applications which are made up of 80% asp.net webform, and the rest are either winforms or console apps for automation.

I looked at asp.net MVC to see if this was worthwhile for our organization. Downloaded many sample apps, looked at documentation, studied the design pattern, etc. My conclusion at this point in time:

• For our organization this is NOT worthwhile. We've already invested an incredible amount of time educating all of the developers with appropriate, safe, and efficient ways to use the asp.net ajax environment with Telerik components.
• The learning curve to reeducate the programmers to learn and bring their in-depth knowledge to the same level isn't justified.
• I always have to look ahead at the local market to see if there are sufficient programmers that can be obtained to either assist with projects, or as new employees. The skill set available for asp.net webforms is 3 to 1 over MVC (at the present time).
• Along with above, someone with MVC experience will most likely want more money - PLUS they're most likely not as verse in other skills. They are most likely focused on the bleeding edge technology rather than having a wide knowledge base, and history. This is a generalization, but I've often seen this in interviews with potential candidates. I'm not looking for the hot-shot programmer than lists the latest buzz words on his/her resume, has done two projects (neither of which is used by more than 3 people), and hasn't seen a variety of projects succeed and especially fail.
• Our architecture uses stored procedures rather than ORM for the business layer. Almost all of our testing is done at the server, so the unit testing capability of MVC is not a benefit to us. The grids and other controls on web pages simply display the data, or provide the postback to server.
• ALL of our applications are business applications, and although viewstate and session tracking are a complete pain in the butt, they are highly needed for our use. MVC doesn't have viewstate - so we'd have to engineer this into the databases. This is best thought of at the start, not at that end!
• The help available for MVC is limited compared to webforms due to maturity of MVC (at present).
• Last (not least), MVC is a DESIGN PATTERN not a technology by itself. It uses asp.net and ajax by itself, but follows a design pattern to isolate the functionality of presentation and actions. I'm sure there are cases where this pattern is a perfect fit, but not in our case.

My advice as you'll most likely find from others is to look at MVC, play with it, and see if it's a fit for what you need. It's good to look at more than one way to accomplish tasks. Design patterns are all around us, some are better than others at specific tasks. MVC was released to show how to use asp.net with a different pattern, which is great!