Scott Guthrie has an excellent set of blog posts about the new ASP.NET MCV framework and it has me geeked. Here are his top posts to see the direction Microsoft is going with their MVC platform:

• ASP .NET MVC Part 1
• UR L Routing in ASP.NET MVC Part 1
• Passing View Data from Controllers to Views Part 3

Rob Conery the creator of SubSonic and now part of the Microsoft ASP.NEt team also has some posts about Microsoft's MVC framework

• ASP .NET MVC and REST
• MVC UI Helpers
• SubSonic MVC
• MVC - JQUERY & SubSonic

These blog posts have got me fired up about ASP .NET MVC’s framework because after I spent a couple days doing some Ruby on Rails – Actionpack I was able to see the real power of the Model View Control principles and could really see how it speeds up development time and also makes it easy to follow TDD practices and ensure you are unit testing everything.
Since I have been on an MVC kick I also have done some research on the Castle Project - Monorail and I have been trying to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Let’s review some features

Castle Project – Monorail

• Has been in the works since 2003, appears to have a good following and works
• Uses a solid ORM – nNhibernate, and I like how you design your classes that generate your Database, rather than designing your database to create your classes.
• Has scaffolding for quick and dirty CRUD
• Supports viewing engines: NVelocity, Brail & ASP.NET Forms
• The Formhelper is very cool, their helper classes seem to be pretty advanced
• They use Log4Net which is a great .NET logging library
• Uses Javascript libraries that are easy to work with such as script.aculo.us

ASP .NET MVC

• Scott Guthrie and Rob Conery are hardly working on it so I know it will be great, but will it be great with its first release?
• ASP .NET Ajax is painful – however, Rob has been doing some MVC with JQuery which is great, because that library is fabulous and I don’t think anyone is eager to do MVC with the ASP .NET Ajax, or web forms viewing engine.
• I’m glad to see that they are supporting more than web forms as their viewing engines, not just ASP.NET forms.
• Right now there is no ORM of obvious choice; the thing I like about RoR & Monorail is data access is done the same in all apps, there is a standard. With ASP .NET MVC we are going to see a million different was to access data – including many ways from MSFT alone. ADO .NET, the new MS Entity framework, LINQ to SQL, Subsonic (?), etc.
• Looks like MS is putting some brains and effort behind this. On Scott’s blog he says they will be supporting this now and in the future, that is giving me some confidence to get behind it.

Overall, I am leaning towards the ASP .NET MVC framework over Monorail the Castle Project but I would like to hear some other thought from users who have been using Monorail for awhile, and how they think the ASP .NET MVC framework will go.