>I'm going to try the MS 70-515 exam to update my cert for our Certified Partner membership.
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>Apparently a lot of the exam deals with MVC and jQuery - neither of which I have dealt with up till now.
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>Watching MVC videos on LearnDevNow what I come away with is that now MS style web development will take another step down by making developers hand code straight HTML rather than using asp.net controls for complex web pages.
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>On top of that they are using JQuery, which is apparently open source (meaning nobody is responsible for quality - like AJAX), for designing events/methods rather than VB/C# based page events. Great.
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>Sounds great if you are billing the client by the hour and you can convince them that it really should take longer to develop a web app now than a couple of years ago.
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>Did I miss something (if so - please show me the base code for a gridview MVC style where all I do is define the columns and the datasource)?
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>I'm going to have to fight through enough of this to pass the exam one way or another, but I just see it as a further annoyance seeing MS make more ways to make development more difficult.

I actually disagree strongly with you. In our shop, we prefer to hand write the HTML since we have very strong designers on staff. I use several open source products such and jQuery, NHibernate, and log4net - if they are not quality products then people won't use them and the project simply dies. I can see how a group of developers would be more dedicated to a pet project than a paid project. It's their passion.

Also, MVC offers very lightweight websites (NO VIEWSTATE!!!!), and is very easy to unit test. ASP.NET WebForms is exactly the opposite. Most people that have tried to do TDD with ASP.NET have either moved to the MVP pattern (and then probably on to MVC) or have moved right to MVC.

MVC also follows more of a traditional web paradigm than ASP.NET WebForms.