Summary

In this chapter we reviewed the long history of presentation patterns with examples. We started by looking at the state of affairs before applications started having their architectures organized into presentation patterns and were instead written as monoliths. We reviewed the many issues with this approach and looked at how Microsoft is making the situation worse with its RAD toolkit that encourages this kind of monolithic design.

We then looked at how things were improved under MVC and how dynamically sharing the session state across views was made easier by MVC. We also reviewed the shortcomings of MVC including covering issues with .NET events and memory leaks before moving on to discussing how MVP addresses some of the MVC short comings. We finished the chapter by looking at an example of the passive view version of MVP covering all the improvements that it offers over MVC in the area of testing and code reuse while pointing out MVP's shortcomings.

In the next chapter will dive into MVVM and demonstrate how it helps address the shortcomings of all the presentational patterns that came before it by taking advantage of features in Silverlight and WPF.