I'm hoping someone can explain to me why pretty much every single resource in ASP.NET MVC, including the models, controllers and views themselves, are capitalized. Is this a naming convention that crossed over from WinForms?

I know it's mostly personal preference, and that the routing engine is not case sensitive, however, there are real reasons why there should be NO capitalization in URLs.

1. It is easier for people to type URLs that have no capitalization.
2. The average visitor will think it's case sensitive, and capitalize letters anyways.
3. It's ugly.
4. Faster development (Saves a few hundred shift-keys per day).
5. Technically inclined visitors can immediately tell that you're using ASP.NET MVC (I'm a proud MS user, but I'd rather advertise it to the world in the form of capitalized views).
6. SEO? (people don't capitalizes their search terms).

That said, it's a real pain to have to go though the entire default MVC template and lower the case on everything.

http://localhost:4629/home/index works.

as you mentioned, the routing engine is case insensitive.

I did not have to lower case anything.

I am guessing SEO lowercases everything such that Home/Index and home/index equate to the same value.

DiNASTY:

The average visitor will think it's case sensitive, and capitalize letters anyways.

the average vistor is not going to type Home/Index

I made this small change to Site.Master:

<div id="menucontainer">
<ul id="menu">              
<li><%= Html.ActionLink("home", "index", "home")%></li>
<li><%= Html.ActionLink("about", "about", "home")%></li>
</ul>
</div>

When I run this do nothing application, it displays as:

http://localhost:4629/

If I click the "about" tab, I see:

http://localhost:4629/home/about

I can use:

http://localhost:4629/home

Even:

http://localhost:4629/home/ABOUT

At a real ASP.NET MVC site:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1489668/reflection-c-question and

http://stackoverflow.com/QUESTIONS/1489668/reflection-c-question

both work.

Gerry

P.S.:  mostly, the average visitor will click her/his way around your site.

gerrylowry:

P.S.:  mostly, the average visitor will click her/his way around your site.

This is true. 

I guess I'm just frustrated with the naming convention itself. Obviously, I'm not alone, as I see stackoverflow lowered the case on their ActionLinks as well. I'll just have to explain to the next developer that picks up my project that /home/about actually points to the About.aspx view. No biggie.

Thanks,

-Derek

DiNASTY:

I'll just have to explain to the next developer that picks up my project that /home/about actually points to the About.aspx view.

Derek, you are welcome.

If you want to bother, you can rename About.aspx to about.aspx ... it still works.
You probably already know that.

BTW, I agree with you.  I wonder why they went with uppercase
names for the pages when the lower case names work too.

The other thing is that AFAIK, case insensitivity in an Internet
context is not really appropriate.

In a Windows world, myfile.txt and MyFile.txt are the same file.

In a broader Internet world, myfile.txt is not the same as MyFile.txt
because file names are normally case sensitive.  AFAIK, this is
because UNIX/Linux treats file names this way.

I am guessing that either the ASP.NET MVC went with case insensitivity
on purpose, or that case insensitivity is a side effect of ASP.NET MVC
being hosted on a Windows platform.  The latter is more likely AFAIK.

Regards,
Gerry (Lowry)