Cool things you can do with strongly-typed models

Declarative style in Razor

The apply-templates and match="..." features are part of XSLT and lets you declare how to handle various types of content. You can tell XSLT how to render some types of content, and then you can ask XSLT to "render that content" and it will figure it out. Much nicer than ugly huge switch(...) or if-else statements.

Turns out it is possible to do something similar in Razor. Assuming content is an IPublishedContent instance that can be of any content type (but is strongly typed, and is not a dynamic):

@* declare how to render a news item *@
@helper RenderContent(NewsItem item)
{
  <div>News! @item.Title</div>
}

@* declare how to render a product *@
@helper RenderContent(Product product)
{
  <div>Product! @product.Name cheap at @product.Price</div>
}

@* render our content *@
@RenderContent((dynamic) content)

By casting the strongly-typed to a dynamic when calling the RenderContent method, you tell C# to do late runtime binding and pick the proper RenderContent implementation depending on the actual CLR type of the content object. Using dynamic here is OK and will not pollute the rest of the code.