I am back on my Monorail kick again, recently developing an application needed to demo our site to clients. Using the latest Monorail framework available from Castle Project, I decided to implement this project which adheres to the MVC pattern.

I started with giving myself one day to figure out if I could use Monorail (MR) easily enough to be productive. As it turns out, in that one day, I was able to create the framework for the site, which is an ASP.NET app, using C#, leveraging the NVelocity view engine and Castle's Windsor Container. The resulting code is so decoupled it is beautiful.

In addition to this single MR application, I am now going to integrate MR into our legacy ASP.NET web app as well. Without doing a rewrite of our current project, we can slowly use MR in situations where it makes better sense. Now I can take advantage of Windsor's dependency injection with ease.

I was able to create a simple ASP.NET application using web forms, modifying session, using forms authentication, and user identity - all that good stuff that ASP.NET provides. I then decided to integrate MR into this app, just to see if the two would play together. As it turns out, they play nicely together, and session remains accessible between the two.

The key to using the two together is to map the *.rails extension, or whatever extension you desire to MR, and *.aspx to web forms in the web.config. I then added Windsor Container and NVelocity, and everything is working. Totally cool!

If you are asking yourself, "great, why would you use MR?" then visit this site. Thanks to the Castle team for their contributions and forum support.