Phil Haack, much like Sarah McLaughlin, is building a mystery.  A mystery that yours truly, despite being a certified genius,

cannot figure out the answers to.  Thereby I am opening this up to everyone so that I have a hope of being enlightened.

1) Phil posts part 3 of his series in infinite parts about how he has recently discovered abstract base classes are the best thing ever, at least when it comes to the Microsoft MVC!  Negative but constructive feedback follows, mostly along the standard "why aren't you going interface-based" and "shouldn't third-party vendors be responsible for keeping up with breaking changes if they are directly dependent on the MVC dll" queries. Nothing we haven't seen in the feedback to the past few posts.

2) However, David Nelson makes an excellent point in the comments:

"Whenever I see a MSFTie blog about backwards compatibility and breaking changes, the overwhelming majority of responses are in favor of relaxing the extreme stance toward breaking changes that .NET has exhibited so far. Yet you say:

"to the vast majority of clients out there, breaking changes is a big problem."

and

"we've already heard overwhelming feedback against breaking changes as much as possible."

Where is this feedback coming from, and why doesn't anyone else in the blogging community have visibility into it?"

3) Phil responds with:

"@David Nelson the vast majority of developers don't read my blog. :) I tend to think the more advanced devs are the ones reading my blog. The ones who care about this sort of thing."

So this left me with several questions:

a) If MVC is considered a more "advanced" alternative to WebForms, and MS is firmly behind keeping the existing WebForms model as well, who exactly *is* the MVC being marketed to? 

b) If MVC *isn't* considered a more "advanced" alternative to WebForms, what exactly was the purpose behind introducing it other than to dissuade MS developers from trying to jump to MVC frameworks like Rails?

c) Are there actually developers out there that are:

• advanced enough to seek out, download, and experiment with a product in 2nd beta like the MVC
  
• not "advanced" enough to go to Phil's blog (where apparently only advanced developers hang out) considering he's one of the PMs on the project and the most active blog posters *on* the topic of MVC?  Where else would people go to get information on it and its future right now aside from Hanselman, Conery, Haack and Guthrie?

d) What was the answer to the question asked above:
"Where is this feedback coming from, and why doesn't anyone else in the blogging community have visibility into it?"


I haven't determined prizes for this yet but rest assured someone who can answer these successfully *will* get something!!