Several months ago I posted about one of my newest sites, ASPDotNetMVC.com. One of the main reasons for creating the site was for my own selfish purposes. I had begun digging into ASP.NET MVC and I wanted a site that aggregated all the good ASP.NET MVC news and blog posts so I could keep up to date. Since that time I’ve done a lot of reading but little doing, other than a side trip with Kigg, a Digg clone written with ASP.NET MVC (Upgrading Kigg to ASP.NET MVC Preview 3, How to decouple the ASP.NET Membership database from Kigg and How to use Kigg as a service from another site).
This weekend I finally made some time to get my hands dirty. My first task is to convert the ASPDotNetMVC.com site from web forms to ASP.NET MVC. So far things are going well and I’m actually surprised at how quickly it is progressing. In a couple of hours I was able to get the master page setup and convert all of the static pages and content to controllers/views (things like the About page, some of the home page, etc). The next step, which I’m currently in the middle of, is converting the Contact Us form. Then the more difficult parts: converting existing controls, rss feeds, and the dynamic content (the majority of the site!). It’s been a long time since I’ve had to hit Google for nearly every little piece of code that I write. It’s a bit frustrating, but challenging and invigorating at the same time.
I won’t set a timeline because I don’t know what challenges I will run into yet. I should have time through the holidays to keep plugging away. I’ll be sure to post if I run into anything interesting.
BTW, I updated my Preview 3 version of Kigg to the ASP.NET MVC Beta bits on Friday night and it was a piece of cake. I just followed the Beta Release Notes instructions for “Upgrading and Existing Preview 3 application to Beta” and things went well.