My background is mostly in desktop applications on the Microsoft platform. I've been working a lot with ASP.Net MVC lately and completely skipped over learning webforms. I find I'm having the most trouble (not being a web guy) with writing my views in MVC. How proficient should I be with HTML and javascript to write good views in MVC? Also, is the standard Webforms view engine what I should go with, or would I have an easier time using the Spark view engine, given my background?
You'll need a good understanding of HTML, JavaScript (and jQuery most likely) and CSS for most web work these days. It doesn't matter if you are using ASP.Net MVC w/ Spark, default engine or other technologies like PHP. In the end, the browser only understands HTML, JavaScript and CSS, the other stuff is just to assist in creating that final output, but you still need to understand what you want to be generating.
Regarding view engine, if you are working on learning for future use rather then for an immediate project you want to put into production ASAP, I'd suggest taking a look at Microsoft's upcoming view engine Razor.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/02/introducing-razor.aspx
It is being built for the ASP.Net MVC 3 release taking lessons learned from Spark, NHaml and the default view engine.
From the article:
Design Goals
We had several design goals in mind as we prototyped and evaluated “Razor”:
Compact, Expressive, and Fluid: Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required in a file, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote server blocks within your HTML. The parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a really compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.
Easy to Learn: Razor is easy to learn and enables you to quickly be productive with a minimum of concepts. You use all your existing language and HTML skills.
Is not a new language: We consciously chose not to create a new imperative language with Razor. Instead we wanted to enable developers to use their existing C#/VB (or other) language skills with Razor, and deliver a template markup syntax that enables an awesome HTML construction workflow with your language of choice.
Works with any Text Editor: Razor doesn’t require a specific tool and enables you to be productive in any plain old text editor (notepad works great).
Has great Intellisense: While Razor has been designed to not require a specific tool or code editor, it will have awesome statement completion support within Visual Studio. We’ll be updating Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 to have full editor intellisense for it.
Unit Testable: The new view engine implementation will support the ability to unit test views (without requiring a controller or web-server, and can be hosted in any unit test project – no special app-domain required).
For ASP.Net MVC 3 Preview 1, take a look at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/27/introducing-asp-net-mvc-3-preview-1.aspx