ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution

Chapter 2. Introducing the ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC)

The first chapter introduced you to TheBeerHouse and the problem, design, and solution that we are going to focus on over the course of this book. But before you start creating the modules necessary to develop TheBeerHouse in ASP.NET MVC, this chapter teaches you a little about what MVC (or the Model-View-Controller) really is and how it is implemented on top of the ASP.NET framework.

The Model-View-Controller Pattern

The Model-View-Controller architectural pattern has been around since 1978 and was first described by Trygve Reenskaug while working on a programming language called Smalltalk at Xerox PARC. The implementation was first described in his now famous paper on the subject, titled "Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80: How to use Model-View-Controller," published in December 1979, and has been popping up in many different ways and forms since the original paper was published. Reenskaug maintains a page that explains MVC in his own words (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html) and contains his publications on the subject; the 1979 publication is only two pages long and well worth the read.

The MVC pattern has been implemented in almost every programming language in use today, including ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, XML, and of course, .NET. In fact, in November 2002 the W3C (the main international standards body for the World Wide Web) voted to make the ...