ASP.NET MVC - separating large app

Question

I\'ve been puzzled by what I consider a contradiction in terms: ASP.NET MVC claims to be furthering and supporting the \"separation of concern\" motto, which I find a great

Answer 1

Controllers: AFAIK you shouldn't have to do anything special to throw controllers into their own assembly. At the very most all you'd have to do is override the GetControllerType method of your ControllerFactory.

Models: Zero restrictions on where you put your models. Although this is frowned upon I regularly use persistent objects from an Nhibernate/other ORM layer or WCF/service layer DTO thats are located in a separate assembly as my views. This works the same way using WebForms.

Views: Views in a separate assembly must be marked as embedded resource and then you must use a custom VirtualPathProvider that knows how to get the views from an resource instead of the file system. views from an resource instead of the file system. Again this is the exact same technique you would use for WebForm development.

Regarding mcintyre321 and his Portable Areas answer: The linked project does barely anything custom and simply wraps up the existing MVC 2 extensibility points into an easier to use abstraction. Its barely "custom" and more syntactic sugar.

You manage a large MVC app just like you'd manage any other large app. I dread opening up a 500 page WebForms project because you never quite know whats in each of those code behinds. With MVC distinct functionality is mostly within its right place. Its not contrary at all.