Foreword
In 2007 I was visiting the Redmond campus for a conference and happened to be walking the halls of building 42 when I ran into Scott Guthrie, corporate VP of the .NET Developer Platform (he was General Manager at the time). He is probably better known by his alias, ScottGu, or by his nickname, "The Gu". He was rushing off to a meeting but asked me to swing by his office later as he had something "interesting" to show me. If you know Scott, you know when he has something interesting to show, it's going to be good.
That interesting thing of course was the nascent design of ASP.NET MVC. As he started drawing the conventions and code patterns in use for this new framework, my only response was, "I want to work on that." Though it wasn't intended to be a recruiting pitch (as far as I know), it was the best one I've ever received. I ended up moving to Microsoft to be a part of this product.
What excites me about ASP.NET MVC? In many ways it represents a lot of firsts for Microsoft in its approach to product design. We've released previews early and often complete with source code which allowed modifications very early in the process. In doing so, we've received unprecedented amounts of feedback from the community and even made significant design improvements in response. Increased transparency and community involvement was a key goal of this project.
ASP.NET MVC is also the first product from Microsoft to include a third party open source library, jQuery "in the box". This is a ...