Before watching the show:

• It is great that we are finally seeing signs of changes
• Technologically, doesn't sound much different than MonoRail
• Politically, great news
• Not sure why everyone is raving about the routing support

During:

• Things I haven't heard in Microsoft talk so far:
  • Unit Testing
  • Mocking
  • Not using the designer
  •  Separation of Concerns
  • Maintainable by default
• My stuff that are being mentioned:
  • Brail
  • Rhino Mocks
• Leaving holes for the community to plug.
• Great things that shouldn't have caused excitement:
  • Clean URL
  • Clean HTML
  • Not using post backs
• It shows some nice possibilities of C# 3.0, I think that this is showing some new API styles that we can use in C# 3.0
• Things that are complete surprise:
  • Getting a test project that support NUnit, MbUnit, etc
• Key phrases:
  • Not forced
  • Mockable
  • Testable
  • We should look into it
• IHttpRequest, sweet!
• There was a lot of time spent on routing
• A moment of bliss:
  • "If you know MonoRail, it is the logical equivalent to layout" - I had to say the reverse too often
• Server controls for this framework are just renderers. This means that I can plug them into MonoRail.

After:

• I need to do more C# 3.0 stuff, I actually installed Beta 2 while I watched the movie.
• Routing is nice, and I like the idea of having is centralized, but I still can't figure out why is was such a big thing.

Summary:

The MVC framework is fairly standard, there was another one a short while ago, ProMesh.NET, which much of the same capabilities. That was not the important part of the presentation as far as I am concerned. The important part was (a) awareness and (b) willingness to cooperate with the community. And that was the best news I had from Microsoft in a long while.