Lame.
Leaving out the backend stuff, the front-end of web work usually ties into generating reasonably complex HTML or XML.
In dynamic languages it is almost trivial to keep the overhead to a minimum because it's fairly easy to tie into these domains. With languages like Java and C# this quickly becomes a pain and the templating structures provided require learning yet another crazy and inefficient (typing and maintainability-wise) pseudo-language.
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.
I do agree that this is MS trying to play catch-up and is trying to prevent developers from jumping the ship, but it's still only 1.0.
Docs will get better, but lack of contributions is sad.
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 will disagree about ORM- there are already plenty of ORM and ORM-like frameworks out there for .NET, and I don't think the MVC team wanted to add another one.
Not sure about the routing being verbose. I'm (hopefully) close to finishing up a fairly complicated app with the framework, and routing hasn't been a problem for me.
I will definitely agree with point 12 though, but that's because the WebForms model causes brain damage if you use it for too long.
StackOverflow (the biggest public ASP.NET MVC site that I know of) uses LINQ to SQL for instance, which is built in to the framework.
MS gets grief when they include something people don't want by default so they decided with MVC to avoid an ORM war and give people the option to use whatever they want (or are already using) and they get grief anyway.
To be a tad more specific...
1. A few of his issues are just wrong. The MVC team has been very open about including the community and taking contributions for example.
2. A lot of the author's comparisons are unfair because he's comparing a product that essesntially had it's first official release a few days ago to Rails. So complaints like "the community is too small" or "Microsoft might kill the project as a cost cutting measure" are not fair
3. A lot of his arguments are really the age old static vs dynamic language debate. I won't open that can of worms now but needless to say both sides have valid opinions. So it isn't fair to ding C# for that.
4. On another point Rails is what most call "opinionated software" while ASP.NET strives to give a lot of choices. So dinging ASP.NET for allowing the programmer to choose an ORM package that fits their needs doesn't seem really fair (Microsoft does provide one in the form of the Entity Framework)
