This is a horribly uninformed opinion piece with no substantial data to back up any claims. MVC is a huge step forward for MS. 10 releases prior to 1.0. The source is available (yes, they don't take contributions). It has 94% code coverage. It's brand new and it's true the docs need some improvements. .NET has three ORMs built in (L2S, EF and typed Datasets, which are crap, but they're there) that you can use for the model. Validation and scaffolding are there (not sure how they missed that) and there's excellent 3rd party validation tools (like xVal). C# 3.0 is awesome (LINQ rules and it's more than just LINQ to SQL) and hardly verbose.
I hope people don't read this blog post and dismiss ASP.NET MVC because of it, because the post is just plain wrong.
Exactly. There are a lot of claims in this article that aren't correct.
For example, No integrated ORM doesn't mean that you have to write a lot of boilerplate code...boilerplate code should always be abstracted away.(also, if you use linq-to-sql, there are tools to help you with code generation)
Also, for the licensing, if i remember correctly. You're allowed to change the source anyway you. But it's true that it's not not an open source license because it stops you from re-distributing your changes.
The API is actually more unified now then in prior releases...the prior releases weren't done on purpose, just that the framework was changing too fast.
The strong typing and the views thing is actually a requirement because you're using a statically typed language. That doesn't make it less powerful, just different. And as mentioned, you can(and should) abstract that away via custom types and so on...
I've been using the framework for about 7 months now in one project and i think it's very nice. I usually develop using Django and so can't stand something like webforms that has a lot of magic.(i do miss python's native dictionaries though whenever i am writing c#)
I hope people don't read this blog post and dismiss ASP.NET MVC because of it, because the post is just plain wrong.
EDIT: Here's an example of how the docs are already being worked on: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-n... Completely free and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives.