well, that chapter is a quick read, and it seems to be enough to give an accurate first impression. now, the quality of that first impression may vary. the chapter's at http://tinyurl/aspnetmvc, book name on front cover.
the sample is for a web app only. this is asp.net mvc, not a general mvc framework. not sure how this might map, if at all, to other presentation methods / runtime contexts. maybe there's more info in the more in-depth chapters of that book. it's not out yet, and that chapter is in pre-publication shape too, has some noticeable (minor) errors.
the sample app is live at nerddinner.com. now, on my xo's browser, it doesn't come up well at all - missing all kinds of styles, the maps, much navigation, etc.. not sure what that's all about, probably ajax related, on which this particular app seems to rely heavily in some areas. or perhaps the xo's browser is not jquery friendly, who knows. not worth finding out. but it's a mozilla xulrunner / gecko core, so it's interesting that this thing doesn't work there.
asp.net mvc v1.0 - we all know about ms first versions. in the sample app, they hand craft data listing and paging logic. now, it's a lot easier than it would have been pre c# 2.0, but one would think that all the tools (e.g., server controls) that we've come to rely on in webforms would need functional representation in this framework as well. anyone doing a not-small website will end up having to build or borrow a library of support functionality. the existing server controls aren't a good match for this framework.
mvc itself - eh, ok, this is stuff we should at least be aware of. the asp.net version seems not-ready-for-prime-time, but it certainly can support building small personal sites. but as for the "pattern" - if I ponder my own code habits over the years, I can see that I kind of do a lot of these things in one form or another already. it's a less overt, often less clean, but sometimes more elegantly subtle approach containing these same ideas. and that makes sense that halfway decent coding practices would converge on similar solutions to similar problems. with variation, of course. I noticed that the other day when considering what I had just done in that twitter-to-communityserver aggregator I've been tinkering with. it's got all the same types of layers, and when I dug up a c# new language features list, I discovered that I was already using some of that stuff without being aware of it. some things just seem "natural" to try. the good news is that these natural impulses now are often successful, whereas they used to result in failures, just brick walls with "I wish I could do this" written on them. for example, I got away with using an unnamed delegate, passing an expression that returned a method signature as a parameter on a constructor. they call that sort of thing "dependency injection" and "inversion of control" these days. same goes for using reflection to instantiate types specified in configuration files, for example. like with "ajax" the terminology and hype is often obscuring rather than reinforcing solid technical habits.
which is disturbing. it does two things: (1) it disenfranchises existing practitioners to some extent, similar to the new slang on the playground every year; and (2) it encourages unthinking formulaic approaches to this profession, which as a class has never been successful. great - another golden hammer, which the young'uns - and wanna-be trend-chasing old'uns - declare to be the "right" way. apparently perspective, experience and wisdom are still not valued. nothing new there.
so, mvc, ruby on rails, dynamic languages, closures, lambda functions, ioc, patterns, etc. etc. etc. - been there, done that, quit yanking me around with the labels. pisses me off that all those morons need a goddamn popular fad and a catchy name before they'll listen to any sense - assuming that there's a correspondence to sense there in the first place, which isn't always the case.
blogging, I know.
so, I'm tiring of twitter. another fad. it's nice to have that micro-blogging channel (in the strict sense), as I posted about earlier, but fuck using it as a chat / im mechanism. if I want to talk _to_ someone, I'll do it via better channels. I was never really into talking loudly at parties. who are we trying to impress here ? and as for the information sharing, there are better, more focused ways - delicious, blogs, whatever. as a news channel ? not hardly. the only motivation I can see that would keep me hanging around is that "everyone else is doing it", and not because of wanting to be there - it's that people have disappeared from those other channels. so I have to choose between going my own way, and joining the rest of the world in a least common denominator fuck fest ? I'll choose the way I always do, thank you. meanwhile, I'll micro-blog in a vaccum, the way I regular blog. it's just a tool.
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oh - no "events" concept in asp.net mvc. get used to it ;-p