I mentioned in an earlier post I’d had a chance to meet Phil Haack when I was at the PDC a little while ago. One of the things that came up at the Asp.Net Mvc special interest table was the subject of third party view engines, and I’m happy he took me up on my request to take a closer look at Spark. It sounds like he liked what he saw and it has shown up in his blog posts about Rendering A Single View Using Multiple ViewEngines and ASP.NET MVC Northwind Demo Using the Spark View Engine.

The feedback in the comments are really great, too. Some people seem to get the benefits behind a simple text- and xml-editor-friendly view engine, while others point to the lack of intellisense or have a general sort of “it ain’t broke” attitude towards the webforms view engine.

Which is perfectly fine of course! The purpose was never to provide a superset of the aspx functionality as a feature-parity replacement. That would be insane. Rather it’s a syntax that’s optimized for a particular style of development and developer: someone that know what’s in their viewdata, knows what their html should look like, and doesn’t want the code to get in the way as the two come together. Plus some tricks to keep the templates nice and clean looking.

Although I suspect you can guess from the last post that the next thing for Spark could be a Visual Studio Integration Package for colorization and intellisense. Tricky! Probably have more on that later.