>>>>Interesting that the same guy, Scott Guthrie, refers to the ASP.NET MVC 3 master page as SiteLayout.cshtml ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/22/asp-net-mvc-3-layouts.aspx ) and in another artilce as _Layout.cshtml ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/30/asp-net-mvc-3-layouts-and-sections-with-razor.aspx ). No wonder I am confused <g>.
>>>
>>>As an aside, Scott Guthrie is the father of ASP.NET MVC. MVC is a very old design pattern, decades old, but Guthrie is the one who came up with the idea of applying it to ASP.NET. Supposedly it came to him on an airplane flight.
>>
>>I sometimes wonder whether a MVVM pattern would have been better - but trying to compare the two in a web context makes my brain hurt :-{
>
>I personally also think the onion metaphore of MVVM is cleaner than the somewhat helter/skelter ways some MVC patterns allow updating the view not only via C triggered roundtrip from M but from C as well, but that battle has been lost long ago and MS had to jump on the MVC band wagon. MVVM being closer to "stateful" might still colour my thinking - the pure fire and forget of classic MVC is hard to beat for statelessness ;-)

I think your last point about statelessness is relevant and made me think a bit more about why MVVM might not be so good.

But if we move away from the idea of having the MS MVC pattern on the server and look at using it on the browser end (with, for example, angular) then MVVM looks good (in fact, arguably, the angular way of doing things IS closer to MVVM) ?