While I'm certainly glad that Phil & co are finally replacing the inadequate WebForms view engine with something better, I'm nonplussed that the "something bett

While I'm certainly glad that Phil & co are finally replacing the inadequate WebForms view engine with something better, I'm nonplussed that the "something better" still isn't at least as good as Spark - especially since Louis (the creator of Spark) works on the Asp.net team now. I realize that Spark's fake-HTML-element syntax would not be everyone's personal favorite (reminders of: Cold Fusion, WebForm server controls), the fact is that Spark provides a good bit of "value add" on top of the normal view engine goodness. Example (in Spark): <ul> <li each="var p in Model.Products" class="alt?{pIndex%2!=0} isFirst?{pIsFirst} isLast?{pIsLast}"> Product: ${p.Name} </li> </ul> Would output: <ul> <li class="isFirst">Product: AAA</li> <li class="alt">Product: BBB</li> <li>Product: CCC</li> <li class="alt isLast">Product: DDD</li> </ul> The alternation of rows and detection of first/last row is an _extremely_ common scenario for web developers that Spark totally gets right, but so far Razor just ignores. I'm glad there will be an option for the masses that are just using whatever is packed in the box, but so far I'm not seeing what all the fuss is for those of us that long since moved on from the built-in ViewEngine.