I’ve been working in ASP.NET MVC as much as possible lately, because it’s so much more enjoyable than working in WebForms. There is still some debate about its usefulness for some applications, but that is a whole separate topic. 
One of the things I’ve done is create some HTML helper functions. They are really useful and there are several more I think I could create. I don’t know if these are as generic as they could be, but they work pretty well for what I need them for. When I start my next MVC project I may see that they could use some revision and I’ll extract them into their own library. They do require a dependency on System.Web.Mvc.
The first function I made because I missed it from my Ruby on Rails days: LinkToUnlessCurrent. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised that this is not baked in. The second function I made when I started getting more requests for role-based authentication. Using AD as your role and auth provider makes all this really easy – you can just use the group name as your role name anywhere in MVC.
Ok, here’s the code:
<Extension()>
Public Function LinkToUnlessCurrent(ByVal helper As HtmlHelper,
ByVal linkText As String,
ByVal action As String,
ByVal controller As String,
Optional ByVal other As Object = Nothing,
Optional ByVal htmlAtts As Object = Nothing
) As String
Dim currentAction As String
Dim currentController As String
currentAction = helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values("action").ToString()
currentController = helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values("controller").ToString()
If currentController = controller And currentAction = action Then
Return "" & linkText & ""
Else
Return helper.ActionLink(linkText, action, controller, other, htmlAtts).ToString
End If
End Function
<Extension()>
Public Function LinkToIfInRole(ByVal helper As HtmlHelper,
ByVal roleName As String,
ByVal linkText As String,
ByVal action As String,
Optional ByVal controller As String = Nothing,
Optional ByVal other As Object = Nothing,
Optional ByVal htmlAtts As Object = Nothing) As String
' See where we are, default the controller if needed
Dim currentController As String = helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values("controller").ToString()
If controller Is Nothing Then controller = currentController
If helper.ViewContext.HttpContext.User.IsInRole(roleName) Then
Return helper.ActionLink(linkText, action, controller, other, htmlAtts).ToString
Else
Return String.Empty
End If
End Function