As web application frameworks have progressed, application architects have worked to rejuvenate the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework that was so ubiquitous in earlier GUI application development frameworks. The archetypal MVC implementation for Java web applications is the Apache Jakarta Struts project, which provides a standard infrastructure for Java developers (http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/index.html). No such universal framework has emerged, however, for web applications based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. In the past, script-oriented development of ASP web applications has prevented developers from being able to effectively apply object-oriented design patterns and the logical separation of components that are typically employed in MVC framework implementations. There are a few well-distributed articles that describe ways of applying the MVC design rules to ASP applications, but these typically make uncomfortably frequent use of the term "workaround." The advent of ASP.NET, however, provides the prime opportunity to implement a more robust and eloquent MVC framework for .NET web applications.
This article covers the classic motivations behind the MVC framework and refers to several resources for learning more about how this has been implemented for Java web applications and classic ASP web applications. It does assume, however, that the reader has a basic understanding of the MVC framework and common object-oriented design patterns. The dynamic MVC framework described in this article takes advantage of XML/XSLT, the ASP.NET web application server, and several useful features of the .NET Framework (namely Reflection).