The post and ensuing discussion has been exactly about that… finding reusable UI components for MonoRail, which should help immensely with MonoRail adoption.

I am glad that these worlds are startign to come together a bit, but it seems a bit strong to make fun of people who insist that re-writing yet another sortable data table layout by hand is a waste of time. Count me among them.

When I talk to traditional ASP.NET developers about MonoRail, the first thing I usually hear is something along the lines of: “WHAT?!?! You dont have WebControls? You mean I have to handcode the HTML for a DataGrid?”

You know, I find that slightly amusing. When I first started doing ASP.NET applications, I often opted to use Repeaters over DataGrids — I didn’t like DataGrids because they didn’t allow me to write my own HTML, and I wanted to do certain things with the table headers that DataGrids weren’t flexible enough to do without writing a bunch of code to override the cell rendering.

What scared me was that there were a bunch of devs where I worked who preferred to mess around with the rendering rather than have to write their own HTML…

BTW, I’m also doing a lot of MonoRail development these days and have a few blog posts about View Components specifically that may be of interest…

http://joeydotnet.com/blog/category/16.aspx