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Comment by eckyptang | Hacker News Reader

Not related to the site, but now there is an audience... regarding asp.net mvc:

Can we have support and out of band releases for asp.net mvc without having to go through connect or partner support, which are both to be honest, utter shit?

Also can you get the API right and leave it right so we don't have to piss around for a week with our container and testing environment.

And finally, can you give us something better than razor which has a parser that isn't made of broken twigs and has proper separation of content and programming language (its horrid sorry). Jinja2/django/golang templates FTW.

Oh and sort out SQL 2012 licensing. It's going to cost us £768,000 to upgrade out kit from 2008 to 2012. Postgres migration is an order of magnitude cheaper.

I'm coming from a large asp.net mvc project and its not pleasant, sorry. Welcome to Microsoft centric development!

Content on the web site is pretty good though.

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For your first few question: You can get signed nightly builds of ASP.NET MVC. Instructions are here: https://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/

Depending on the kind of support you're looking for, the discussions and issues on CodePlex may help as well. Otherwise, there's community support (often including ASP.NET team members) in the following places: http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC http://stackoverflow.com/ http://jabbr.net/#/rooms/aspnetmvc

There are some other view engines available if you don't like Razor. Since you mentioned Django, I'm guessing you've looked at NDjango(http://ndjango.org/index.php?title=NDjango_Home). Another one I've been keeping an eye on is Parrot (http://thisisparrot.com/) - still in development, but I really like the syntax.

After that it got kinda ranty so not sure if I missed some other questions.

I'm talking supported builds, not signed builds. You know with the pile of pre-paid support credits that we get with our partnership agreement which are supposed to result in solutions. Every support call requires a week long argument with the lowest grade of software support who phone me up and ask if they can close the call every day without escalating it. I'm aware of the support options you mention, which basically result in "yes, just limp along with the dependency injection problems with ActionFilters in MVC3 for 6 months" or fork and fix it yourself. We chose the latter, but it's expensive so we might as well forfeit the partner agreement, use Open Source software and pay someone to maintain our forks and contribute patches to the products.

We've looked at NDjango, but it's based on F# and as we well know, unless a product is a mainstream MS platform then it's liable to go out of the window on a whim or is shrouded constantly with uncertainty (choke silverlight, original workflow foundation, XNA? etc).

Sorry if this is rather critical and slightly ranty, but I'm slightly pissed off with maintaining this mess.

Can you send me some specifics (jon dot galloway at microsoft dot com)? At a minimum I'd like to make sure we've got a bug filed on the di / filters issue you mention, but more importantly I want to see what we can do about the support issues you're hitting.

I couldn't disagree with you more on the Razor subject. Frankly templating schemes like Django's, Rails, etc all SUCK compared to Razor.

It's crisp concise and fast.

If you like Jinja2 then use it. We have been using it for templating, running with IronPython, for the last couple of years.

Genuinely curious... What are the issues you are having with Razor?

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