For roughly the past month I have been familiarizing myself with MonoRail, an MVC framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. Up to this point, I like it, but it does lack documentation, and community interaction on the Castle forums. I would like to see more examples on the MonoRail website. As for now, I am learning by trial and error.

Using ASP.net 1.1 and 2.0, I have created functional, web applications up to this point, but nothing I have deployed. MonoRail has the ability to switch between three view engines that I am aware, NVelocity, ASP.net, and MonoRail:Brail. The framework also provides an easy means of testing projects by referencing the Castle.MonoRail.TestSupport assembly, which in turns uses NUnit and the ASP.net runtime.

As an ASP.net developer, the idea of moving to MonoRail seemed daunting, but the ability to use ASP.net within the framework made the transition easier, almost acting as a crutch to help me learn something new. Now, I am using the NVelocity engine, because the ASP.net approach requires extra work to decouple the view from the controller. At the same time, my familiarity with ASP.net often influences me to do too much in ASP.net code where I lack knowledge in the MonoRail framework, causing me to break the MVC pattern. I am not saying I will not use the ASP.net capability, but I definitely need to be careful not to rely on it.

I have not had any time to investigate Microsoft’s UIP Application Block, nor have I found any other MVC2 frameworks for ASP.net. I would be interested to hear some feedback on alternatives.