Edmonton developers: learn about MVC with ASP.NET and MonoRail

Developers in Edmonton - you don't want to miss this event! Tom Opgenorth, one of Edmonton's newest MVP's will be on hand tomorrow evening at the Edmonton .NET User Group's monthly meeting to talk about MonoRail, an open source model-view-controller (MVC) framework from the Castle Project. That sound like a bunch of Greek to you? Here's a somewhat more friendly description:

MonoRail differs from the standard WebForms way of development as it enforces separation of concerns; controllers just handle application flow, models represent the data, and the view is just concerned about presentation logic. Consequently, you write less code and end up with a more maintainable application.

Still confused? Think of it this way - ASP.NET's primary model is Web Forms, a vastly different model than most other web frameworks. With MonoRail (and the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC framework from Microsoft) .NET developers can create web applications in a manner similar to their Ruby on Rails counterparts. Indeed, most modern web frameworks use the MVC architecture.

Here are the details for tomorrow's event:

WHO: YOU!
WHAT: MonoRail with Tom Opgenorth at EDMUG
WHEN: 6:00pm on April 24th, 2008 (doors open at 5:30pm)
WHERE: Stanley A. Milner Public Library downtown (directions)
WHY: It's the future, baby!

Entrepreneurs take note: using MVC is the #1 recommendation for startups looking to utilize ASP.NET, according to a recent article that has generated some buzz in the .NET community.

You can learn more about the event at the EDMUG site, and you can follow Tom on Twitter. You may also want to join the EDMUG group on Facebook. See you there!