I'm worried that since he's full time in Redmond now, the old COM goblins have gotten to him and whispered words of worry and fear into his ear :(

My guesses:

a & b) It is considered a more advanced alternative, but won't be marketed that way. No one likes to think they are behind the curve, and the further you get from WebForms the closer you get to looking outside what's available from Microsoft.

c) No. And another source of information might be the Brazilian's all-of-a-sudden arch-enemies.

d) Total bullshit. Invoke the words and phrases "experts" or "the masses" or "vast majority" to short circuit the discussion.

Do I win a prize? I think I answered with just enough seriousness, inside joke-ness and conspiracy theorist paranoia.

First of all, I'd like to point out that no matter how awesome your web application is and how uber 3133t your framework is, all your web application actually does is a bunch of string concatenations and then sends the results to a web browser.

I could do that in any language. Hell, I could do it in assembly language if I wanted to, but since IO is the most annoying thing to handle in assembly, I never would do that. The reason I don't have to is that there are tools that help make this easier to do, like webforms, MVC, Rails, etc.

Therefore, here are my answers:

a)MVC and webforms have the same result in that they create a web app. I find it a bit hackish to make webforms use the MVC pattern (I use MVC to ensure testability of my presentation layer and to promote code reuse and decoupling) because the event procedure and codebehind page model that webforms uses is not exactly meant for it. MVC is therefore being marketed to people who are already using the pattern and want a better, easier way to implement it without webforms getting in the way. Webforms is being kept because there are a lot of winforms and VB 6 devs out there who want to write web applications and they already understand the forms model that those apps use. Keeping both of these things around is a way to ensure that more people will use the .Net platform and Microsoft frameworks so that MS can make money.

b)I think I touched on this above, but MVC isn't necessarily more advanced, it's just a different way to write web apps. Some people and companies won't use non-Microsoft technologies for some reason, so if Microsoft releases an MVC framework and there's a company that wants to use MVC but won't use Rails because it isn't Microsoft, this gives them an opportunity to use MVC and further evangelize how good Microsoft is so that more people will use Microsoft technologies which will sell more copies of SQL Server and Windows Server 2k3. I think Microsoft is also trying to listen to the development community, particularly the "movers" in that community, so that they'll look favorably on Microsoft because Microsoft is listening to them. This will encourage the people who follow them to also use Microsoft, again resulting in the sales of more copies of SQL Server and Windows Server 2k3.

c) Fuck you Phil Haack. I'm an advanced developer and I've been using MVC. I don't even use Webforms and I can STILL use MVC. I use MVC on the LAMP stack too. I downloaded MS MVC because I wanted to check it out and see if it saved me time in doing what I already do. I don't need any tools at all to do what I do. I can use AJAX without prototype, atlas, dojo, or any of that shit. Why? Because I fucking rule. That's why. And I don't "hang out" on your blog because I have a life. There are other blogs with other examples and other documentation. Try and google "MVC .NET example tutorial" and see what pops up in the other 859,999 results besides Phil Haack's blog. Those are resources too.

d) The same place where "70% of all IT projects fail" came from. There is a study about this somewhere (hint: It's in "Communications of the ACM" last time I checked) and it got quoted a bunch of places, and then the bloggers picked it up, and now it's just accepted as part of the blog-o-sphere that 70% of all IT projects fail. If you're saying that you've had "a lot of feedback" it means that you've read some comments on people's blogs that back up what you're saying and you read some other blogs or ALT.NET mailing list posts that also agree with you, so by extension those opinions apply to ALL developers, even though this is about as scientific as Pastafarianism.

If I win a prize, the prize I want is to be officially recognized as a "friend of Justice Gray" so I can put that on my blog. I also want you to write a blog post about how awesome I am and how my blog is great so that I get more readers on it.

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder: One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see." And I saw. And behold, a white horse.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts, And I looked and behold: a pale horse. And his name, that sat on him, was Death. And Hell followed with him.

"Hanselman, Conery, Haack and Guthrie"

The four horsemen of the .NETalypse.

Ok, so which one is Plague and which one is Pestilence?

Obviously Hanselman is pestilence. Justice heard him say "That's infectious disease baby!" right before unleashing a pandemic on an unsuspecting .NET user group.

@Chad - I fear the same thing - or perhaps poor Phil has been *replaced* with a COM goblin look alike! Those cagey beasts can't be trusted.

@Joe - You may actually win the greatest prize of all for this response!

@Jeff - I don't think you need a link from me in order to get hits - just post your comment on your own blog. Man, that was a post in itself! Are you going to punch Haack out @ ALT.NET conf Seattle?

@Simser, @D'Arcy, @Russell - aside from the blaspehmy I liked the allegory! I would view Rob Conery as War since he's always getting people in trouble.