Is rapid development a controversial issue in ASP.NET MVC?
Since asp.net mvc has removed a lot of the controls that were in webforms, does this make the rapid application development on par with other frameworks? For example, if I have an mvc framework in php, j2ee, etc., and I have an asp.net mvc, and the coder knows the given platform, isn't there a development advantage in visual studio?
If I am wrong about the missing controls please let me know, it was my impression that they were (and I couldn't use them when I tried this last one.)
I ask because where I work, like Microsoft, a lot, some may live with it, but those who like it point to Visual Studio for rapid development. I thought a lot of this was missing with asp.net mvc 1.0.
EDIT: I guess I think dragging and dropping controls means Rapid Application Development (again, assuming the coder knows what they are doing everywhere.)
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Rapid app development is just a buzzword. It exists if you develop an application quickly, and not because of any particular tool or technology.
ASP.NET MVC is a very different approach. Some people can run faster when they are closer to HTML. For me, this means I don't have to deal with the (IMHO) touching WebForms data binding model. Instead, I pass my model directly to my view for rendering. This allows me to develop quickly. You can still create your own UserControls (or load many of them that are available through open source projects), but you cannot use anything that has events or ViewState for it.
EDIT: RAD is also a subjective term. Is this fast development of an application if you can release the first iteration in two weeks, but you need to defer the schedule by two months for the second iteration because the code is not supported?
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If you're talking about being able to drag controls onto a page, click them, set some properties and generate code for you as well as a working application, basically drag and drop controls and tools, yes, MVC removes that ability to do RAD.
MVC exists to solve another problem. It is for humans that separation of concerns is required to support unit testing and extensibility. Things that were almost impossible to get with classically designed asp.net applications.
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Web forms were an attempt to be more RAD if you will. However, the emergence of things like MVC and Dynamic Data, as well as things like Linq and Linq2SQL, are pretty good evidence that Web Forms was not a panacea for RAD.
From a personal point of view, you can be faster in web forms by experience alone. This does not mean that the platform or its competitors are better or worse at RAD.
Many people found that web forms were so tight-lipped that they had such large event models that they ended up with less RAD than they hoped.
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I would argue that Rapid Development and ASP.NET MVC are not mutually exclusive by themselves. however, since MVC has a goal of separation of concerns (in particular) to allow testing, this may not be the best choice for Rapid Development -
On the other hand, these are ASP.NET Web Forms where you can do ALOT "visually" / using drag-n-drop (that is, no code), which works very well to some extent, for example preventing strong > testability. But development is "no problem" - it means the most positive way :)
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