Putting the V in MVC

November 23 2011

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting a session at Desert Code Camp. The session I gave was called "Putting the V in MVC". Here is the abstract taken from the schedule:

MVC gives us total control over markup in ASP.NET. Or in other words, you better learn how to turn HTML into something pretty. Luckily, there is a great framework to help us out: jQuery UI! We will take a look at using jQuery UI to do exactly that. We will start with simple HTML markup and transform it into interactive widgets with very little code. jQuery UI widgets add style and behavior to otherwise drab markup without changing its semantics. We will also look at Wijmo, a new toolkit that extends jQuery UI. Wijmo brings over 30 widgets to jQuery UI from Menus to SVG Charts, 18 of which are Open Source. Both jQuery UI and Wijmo can take your Views from boring to brilliant in ASP.NET MVC. After this session you will be ready to start putting the V in MVC!

The Ultimate View

The gist of the session was to propose a new way of creating rich UI in MVC (The Ultimate View). The idea is to use simple HTML markup and then enhance it with jQuery UI and Wijmo. Some benefits from

Take control over your markup
- Clean & lean HTML
- Maintainable markup
Highly interactive UI
Easily integrates jQuery.ajax()
Themeroller support

Note: While I highly recommend that you use Wijmo for most of the UI, this approach is possible with using any jQuery UI widgets or plugins. No matter what plugins you choose, the principle is the same. Start with basic HTML and progressively enhance it with jQuery.