Windows Developer Power Tools

18.6 Simplifying Web Development with Castle MonoRail

.NET offers you a few alternatives when developing web applications. The most popular path is using Web Forms, along with their data-binding support, DataGrids, postbacks, and ViewState. However, what at first might be perceived as a lifesaver can turn into a monster for medium-to-large projects with complex business rules. It’s easy to end up with pages with hundreds of lines of code and business logic scattered everywhere. This makes changing functionality and implementation details very messy and painful.

If you’ve reached this state, you might enjoy meeting Castle MonoRail.

Castle MonoRail was inspired by Ruby on Rails, a Ruby web framework that has made many rethink their approach to web development. Building on that inspiration, MonoRail has grown and acquired its own personality.

MonoRail is based on the Model-View-Controller pattern, which enforces separation of concerns. First, create the controllers that will be responsible for managing the application flow, and then create the view files that will be responsible for presentation logic, and finally, create the model piece that will keep the data.

CastleMonoRail at a Glance
Tool	Castle MonoRail
Version covered	RC 2
Home page	http://www.castleproject.org/index.php/MonoRail
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/45
Summary	Agile MVC framework for web applications
License ...