Again, Microsoft is going in the the right direction. I like the support for dynamic views. UIs - especially present-day, well-built UIs - tend to be very dynamic with the information displayed on the screen.
I Love Razor
The new preview of MVC 3 includes support for the Razor View Engine. Finally! Something new from Microsoft that doesn’t completely suck! Everything I look at here, I completely love. Bye, bye, bee sting (that’s <%=, in case you were wondering).
I Hate Razor
I really wish that MS wouldn’t have written their own. I saw two really good alternatives out there already: NHaml and Spark. Both have their own strong following, and both do so much work for you when putting together your views.
When MS jumped on the jQuery bandwagon, I really hoped that there was more to follow. So far, that hasn’t happened. Along with fully adopting an existing view engine, I wish MS would jump into bed with NHibernate, Ninject, and NUnit. But that’s not going to happen, so I should just get over it.
Once again, it comes down to options. The Rails community will tell you that options are bad. If you have to consider options, then you’re not working on the business problems. What data access layer are we using? That’s decided for you. What validation framework are we using? That’s decided for you. What IoC container are we using? Silly kid, dynamic languages don’t use IoC. Don’t get me wrong: you can still use Haml and Less, but those aren’t things that you have to worry about out of the gate.
At the end of the day, it comes down to MS. MS will do what MS wants to do, developer community be damned.