I spent some time recently taking a look at Castle Monorail. I came across it a while ago, and unfortunately I only really found the time to look at it after MS announced their version of it. I’ve been very impressed with Castle ActiveRecord, so I figured I’d have a play with Monorail anyway, and look at MVC closer to its actual release.

So far I’ve found Monorail itself to be a breath of fresh air, and looking at an MVC framework also helped me appreciate the areas where ASP.NET WebForms actually is quite strong. However finding good documentation has been a mixed experience, so in case anyone else is looking, here are the resources I found the most helpful.

Official Documentation

You can access the framework (installers, source code, documentation, etc) from the Monorail Home Page. The Getting Started Section probably is the best way to get started. Thereafter the place to go for documentation is the trunk documentation.

You can also get this in consolidated form.(This was created by Symon Rottem from the official documentation.) Printing this off is probably the closest you’ll get to having a book on Monorail.

Blogs

Thereafter I find the best way to learn about Monorail is to trawl a few blogs. Most of these blogs are also good resources for ActiveRecord.

  • Ayende: The blog of Oren Eini, one of the main contributors. He hasn’t posted much in 2008, but go back and there are some excellent articles. He’s also done an introductory screencast.
  • Ben Lovell: Ben is putting together a series of screencasts in which he develops a basic blog engine using Monorail.
  • Hammett: The founder. Though you need to be quite familiar with Monorail before you can understand much of what Hammett says.
  • Ken Egozi: If you’re interested in using AspView to bridge between WebForms and Monorail, this is the blog to read.
  • JoeyDotNet: Joey has done a few posts that should be fairly accessible.
  • Colin Ramsay: Notably Colin has done an excellent screencast on using Monorail with ExtJS.
  • Los Techies
  • Billy McCafferty

Forums

The forums are the biggest repository of information on Monorial. You will need a certain level of knowledge before you’ll find much of it useful.

  • There is a forum on the castle site
  • For some reason, while the above forum is still running, it’s no longer particularly active. For that you need to go to the Castle Project User mailing list.
  • (There is also a Wiki-type space on the castle site, but again, it’s a little patchy. There used to actually be a Wiki for Castle, but I believe it’s been shut down due to spammers.)

Search

As ever, Google is your friend. Just remember, if you’re doing general searches, search for “Castle Monorail”, otherwise you’ll probably find yourself reading about light railways.