I do have an issue with one of the new features in Preview 5 though and that is the [ActionName("action")] attribute.  In conjunction with the  [AcceptVerbs("POST")] attribute it allows you have different functionality for a URL depending on how its requested.  This is necessary functionality I just have issue with the way its implemented.  I would prefer to see something along the lines of this.

public object Create(string productName, Decimal unitPrice)
{
    if (Request.Verb == "GET")
    {
        return View("Create");
    }
    else if (Request.Verb == "POST")
    {
        // save the data RedirectToAction("List");
    }
}

I think this would make more sense.  You wouldn’t have the possibility of confusion as to what action to call your code.  You would always call the Create action.  If you started getting actions with a lot of lines of code in them you could just refactor the code in the if else statements into new methods.

I see that someone else ran into this and went ahead and coded a solution for it the Forms Framework with Validation for ASP.NET MVC.  This is an interesting approach to the problem I am not sure how it would deal with forms that are using more than one model.  I want Microsoft to address this feature rather than cobbling basic functionality together from a lot of little side projects that may not see any further progress after their initial development.

ASP.NET MVC still needs a default.aspx in the root of the web site.  The default.aspx just performs a redirect to the URL of whatever controller you are using for the site root. I had not changed the URL that default.aspx was redirecting to.  Once I changed the URL the redirect was using my problem was fixed.  I want to give a shout out to the official ASP.NET MVC forum for the help I got there.  Its nice to see that a Microsoft product is building an actual community around this technology as that more than anything will help it grow and evolve.

I was trying to redirect from an action on one controller to an action on another controller.  RedirectToRoute wasn’t working for me instead of being redirected the current action just kept being reloaded.  This really irritated me because either this is a bug in the framework or I was being tripped up by a misunderstanding of how asp.net mvc works. 

When I went to the official asp.net mvc forum to see if I could find any documentation on this I found several people complaining about things that worked in preview release 3 that don’t work in release 4. This tells me the framework fundamentals are more in flux than I would feel comfortable dealing with at this time.

In trying to dig up documentation on the asp.net mvc framework there was no central repository of information. I really wish they would centralize the existing documentation and update it with each release.

So I have been checking on my order at least once a day since I ordered the phone.  This morning when I checked on my order the QTY Back-Ordered column read 0 instead of one.  I thought maybe they had received a shipment of phones and mine was being processed. However when I checked on my order this afternoon the QTY Back-Ordered read 1 again.  AT&T and Apple have really dropped the ball on this one and I am not pleased at all.

Saturday we hung about the house all kind of doing our own thing.  I started reading a new Sci-Fi book.  I have decided to try and keep recreational reading to the weekends so I can spend my time during the week doing other things.

Sunday I mowed the lawn and enjoyed the weather.  The temperature probably didn’t make it higher than 75°.  We opened up the house and I spent some time reading on the back porch.  It was one of the nicest weekends I can remember.