CSharp Templating Engine investigation

In order to render html from our C# REST service we had to look into templating engines available in C#, since we wanted our generated html to be altered on the fly.

We came across the following

4 View engines exist in

MVCContrib project

Which are

1. Brail
2. NHaml (NHaml has been moved from MvcContrib into a separate project)
3. NVelocity
4. XSLT

In addition we found the following two engines

Spark

StringTemplate and StringTemplateMVC

Asp view from Castle project

Each engine aims to keep the focus on the generated html, and the dynamic contents are inserted into the html.

Our decision about which language to use was based on the following conditions

5. Be able to use the same templating / view engine in asp.net MVC.
6. Do not have to learn a new templating language if possible.
7. Be able to keep the business logic separate from the view templates.
8. Have the least learning curve to implement a basic use case.
9. Has enough capability to be able to use advance features and capabilities.
10. Should be extendable if needed.
11. Should have a very strong developer community to support and sort out the bugs with.
12. Should be in use for sometime to be able to determine its stability.

After doing quite some investigation we decided to go for Spark templating engine, primarily because of the capability of being able to use c# like syntax in templates, and the initial configuration and setup was very simple and easy.