I am just wondering, do you really say that? If so, how does it go over? I ask because what I have realized is that over the last two thousand year while technology has changed, our ability or lack thereof to communicate remains the same: very hard for some of us (myself included) to learn. Thus it seems this is a timeless question. What I find interesting is: in my case, what has changed with regards to the question is not the question itself, but how I answer it. I have a far more loving answer today at 48 than twenty years ago.

That is beautifully said. The problem is not ones nature, but self esteem. Early in my career as a software developer, a coworker enlighten me to the fact the software genius that architected the whole system related his code to his genital size. It was only a few years ago when I was working with someone else of that nature and that person was going off on a rant about something I realized I suffered from the same problem a bit. I vowed to change where I get I sense of self and today I am a much better team player than I was 20 years ago. I didn’t ‘change my nature’, rather I cleared out the weeds so the flower can grow. It is hard, hard work, but anyone can do it if they want and have good folks to support and guide them.

Well this is a matter of the tension between 'get her done' and teaching. The solution my currant company has come up with is using a web based code review system. When I get someone else bug, I fix it, but then I make sure they are on the code review so they can see the fix. If they are someone I know well, I will talk with them about what and why I did it. This allows me to get her done for the business while still making it a teaching opportunity. Mind you, if the other developer does not care, I totally agree with the other poster that said you need to take that to your manager, that IS why they are there:)

Well, I have spent a year with Spring Framework (java), ASP.Net MVC is light years ahead of Spring Framework! What I have seen of both Ruby and Django, they also have a huge leg up on Java. For me, having a tight integration between the template language and the core language is vital to get the most out of the MVC, not something you have in the Java world:(

I agree, persistence is a fundamental flaw of... I have many years of experience in desktop development, only a few years in web development... it is my impression that persistence is the Achilles' heel of web development in general: Either you store lots of stuff on the server or send a lot of stuff across the wire to and from the client all the time. There are lots of different ways to skin the cat, all have pluses and all have minus, there is no one perfect solution. Am I missing the silver bullet?

Actually in the MVC world, similar to the WebForms world, you have the session variable. I simply stored the metadata that was used to generate the HTML in the session variable. Personally I am not a big fan of the ViewState because that means a huge amount of network traffic to your client that simply does not need to happen. I prefer to rely on skilled developers and network admin's to optimize the system to hand session info correctly than simply send it all to the browser when I don't know the type of connection the browser has access to.

Forgive me, but I am a bit rusty in ASP.Net, the day this project was suppose to go out for beta, it was announced that the company had been purchased by a Java shop, so I have been doing Java for the last year. To the best of me knowledge, ViewState is a ASP.Net thing, not a ASP.Net MVC thing. Correct? The basic layout was the use of two models: The lower model, I called simply the model. This model's job was to get the data from the database to the controller. Then I created a view model that had extra view related info that never went to the database.

No, not dynamic via the user, but dynamic via the database. It was a government form that has up to 25 sections for one 'assessment' and can have up to 16 different configurations of those 25 sections. Rather than having 16 different views, the questions and response types came from the database. Strongly typed partial views where used to render the correct html for the question/response type.

You can read pro's and con's all over the place until you are blue in the face, so let me just be a witness to what happened in my company: We where starting a new project, the first lead used ASP.Net, which is where I learned it. We had 6 months to deliver, and we delivered it right on time! In the second, I asked for 2 weeks to do a ASP.Net MVC proof of concept for the next phase. The idea was to have the whole app use both. The reason I wanted to use ASP.Net MVC was because we had to render some dynamic forms. With things I had learned in the MVVM world, I had a feeling that ASP.Net MVC would do some binding between the model type and the view to simplify things exponentially. The second phase was more complex: the dynamic forms, integrating with the old code, and other new features. We had another 6 months, we got it done in 4! The speed and easy of doing it in ASP.Net MVC was simply amazing, I knew it would be faster, but I didn't even begin to imagine it would be as fast and easy as it was. Disclaimer: MVC programming IS a different way of thinking. I, personally, have been thinking in the MVC way for a while because of the MVVM programming I have done, I am positive that foundation helped greatly in speed things up. My point: If you are not use to thinking in the MVC fashion, it might take a bit more time to come up to speed then it did for me. P.S. If you do go the MVC route, make sure you learn and use a Direct Inject (DI) library of some sort. SpringFramework.Net is a good option.

The reality of the matter is that XML only knows about strings. What you need to do is convert the integer into a string representations.