ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Test Driven Development: Problem - Design - Solution

Introduction

Dear reader, thank you for picking up this book, and welcome to the exciting world of Test Driven Development (TDD) and ASP.NET MVC. Sometime in 2008, I quit my job and decided to start my own company. Naturally, my startup was web-based. At the time, I was already very familiar with the Microsoft web development platform, a natural choice for my website. I hesitated to use it because I wanted to learn something new and I wanted to use TDD. Several of the web startups at the time were written in Ruby on Rails (RoR), and I seriously considered going that route. I played around with RoR and became familiar with it. I liked its approach to development, the ease of testing, and the control I had over HTML and JavaScript. There are several things that I didn't like, however, especially the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Nothing came close to Visual Studio. Luckily, around that time Microsoft introduced ASP.NET MVC, which made the decision very easy for me.

Even though ASP.NET MVC was still in early alpha, I went ahead and built my startup on top of it (talk about taking risks). It was a great experience for me and turned out to be a good decision. I instantly fell in love with the MVC way of doing things. I enjoyed the control I had over the generated HTML and scripts. I loved the clean and friendly URLs. I can't imagine living without the unit tests that I could easily run when I make a change, to verify that I haven't broken anything. I can go on and on about ...