Professional ASP.NET MVC 5

Jon Galloway, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen, David Matson

• Publisher: Wrox
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118794753
• eBook ISBN: 9781118794760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Languages
• Index: Computer Science

ASP.NET MVC insiders cover the latest updates to the technology in this popular Wrox reference

MVC 5 is the newest update to the popular Microsoft technology that enables you to build dynamic, data-driven websites. Like previous versions, this guide shows you step-by-step techniques on using MVC to best advantage, with plenty of practical tutorials to illustrate the concepts. It covers controllers, views, and models; forms and HTML helpers; data annotation and validation; membership, authorization, and security.

• MVC 5, the latest version of MVC, adds sophisticated features such as single page applications, mobile optimization, and adaptive rendering
• A team of top Microsoft MVP experts, along with visionaries in the field, provide practical advice on basic and advanced MVC topics
• Covers controllers, views, models, forms, data annotations, authorization and security, Ajax, routing, ASP.NET web API, dependency injection, unit testing, real-world application, and much more

Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 is the comprehensive resource you need to make the best use of the updated Model-View-Controller technology.

Chapter 1
Getting Started

—by Jon Galloway

What's In This Chapter?

• Understanding ASP.NET MVC
• An overview of ASP.NET MVC 5
• How to create MVC 5 applications
• How MVC applications are structured

This chapter gives you a quick introduction to ASP.NET MVC, explains how ASP.NET MVC 5 fits into the ASP.NET MVC release history, summarizes what's new in ASP.NET MVC 5, and shows you how to set up your development environment to build ASP.NET MVC 5 applications.

This is a Professional Series book about a version 5 web framework, so we keep the introductions short. We're not going to spend any time convincing you that you should learn ASP.NET MVC. We assume that you've bought this book for that reason, and that the best proof of software frameworks and patterns is in showing how they're used in real-world scenarios.

A QUICK INTRODUCTION TO ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC is a framework for building web applications that applies the general Model-View-Controller pattern to the ASP.NET framework. Let's break that down by first looking at how ASP.NET MVC and the ASP.NET framework are related.

How ASP.NET MVC Fits in with ASP.NET

When ASP.NET 1.0 was first released in 2002, it was easy to think of ASP.NET and Web Forms as one and the same thing. ASP.NET has always supported two layers of abstraction, though:

• System.Web.UI: The Web Forms layer, comprising server controls, ViewState, and so on
• System.Web: The plumbing, which supplies the basic web stack, including modules, handlers, the HTTP stack, and so on

The mainstream method of developing with ASP.NET included the whole Web Forms stack—taking advantage of drag-and-drop server controls and semi-magical statefulness, while dealing with the complications behind the scenes (an often confusing page lifecycle, less than optimal HTML that was difficult to customize, and so on).

However, there was always the possibility of getting below all that—responding directly to HTTP requests, building out web frameworks just the way you wanted them to work, crafting beautiful HTML—using handlers, modules, and other handwritten code. You could do it, but it was painful; there just wasn't a built-in pattern that supported any of those things. It wasn't for lack of patterns in the broader computer science world, though. By the time ASP.NET MVC was announced in 2007, the MVC pattern was becoming one of the most popular ways of building web frameworks.

The MVC Pattern

Model-View-Controller (MVC) has been an important architectural pattern in computer science for many years. Originally named Thing-Model-View-Editor in 1979, it was later simplified to Model-View-Controller. It is a powerful and elegant means of separating concerns within an application (for example, separating data access logic from display logic) and applies itself extremely well to web applications. Its explicit separation of concerns does add a small amount of extra complexity to an application's design, but the extraordinary benefits outweigh the extra effort. It has been used in dozens of frameworks since its introduction. You'll find MVC in Java and C++, on Mac and on Windows, and inside literally dozens of frameworks.

The MVC separates the user interface (UI) of an application into three main aspects:

• The Model: A set of classes that describes the data you're working with as well as the business rules for how the data can be changed and manipulated
• The View: Defines how the application's UI will be displayed
• The Controller: A set of classes that handles communication from the user, overall application flow, and application-specific logic

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MVC as a User Interface Pattern

Notice that we've referred to MVC as a pattern for the UI. The MVC pattern presents a solution for handling user interaction, but says nothing about how you will handle other application concerns like data access, service interactions, and so on. It's helpful to keep this in mind as you approach MVC: It is a useful pattern, but likely one of many patterns you will use in developing an application.

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MVC as Applied to Web Frameworks

The MVC pattern is used frequently in web programming. With ASP.NET MVC, it's translated roughly as:

• Models: These are the classes that represent the domain you are interested in. These domain objects often encapsulate data stored in a database as well as code that manipulates the data and enforces domain-specific business logic. With ASP.NET MVC, this is most likely a Data Access Layer of some kind, using a tool like Entity Framework or NHibernate combined with custom code containing domain-specific logic.
• View: This is a template to dynamically generate HTML. We cover more on that in Chapter 3 when we dig into views.
• Controller: This is a special class that manages the relationship between the View and the Model. It responds to user input, talks to the Model, and decides which view to render (if any). In ASP.NET MVC, this class is conventionally denoted by the suffix Controller.

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Note

It's important to keep in mind that MVC is a high-level architectural pattern, and its application varies depending on use. ASP.NET MVC is contextualized both to the problem domain (a stateless web environment) and the host system (ASP.NET).

Occasionally I talk to developers who have used the MVC pattern in very different environments, and they get confused, frustrated, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Chapter 1: Getting Started
• Chapter 2: Controllers
• Chapter 3: Views
• Chapter 4: Models
• Chapter 5: Forms and HTML Helpers
• Chapter 6: Data Annotations and Validation
• Chapter 7: Membership, Authorization, and Security
• Chapter 8: Ajax
• Chapter 9: Routing
• Chapter 10: NuGet
• Chapter 11: ASP.NET Web API
• Chapter 12: Single Page Applications with AngularJS
• Chapter 13: Dependency Injection
• Chapter 14: Unit Testing
• Chapter 15: Extending MVC
• Chapter 16: Advanced Topics
• Chapter 17: Real-World ASP.NET MVC: Building the NuGet.org Website
• Appendix: ASP.NET MVC 5.1
• Foreword
• Introduction
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• End User License Agreement