Professional ASP.NET MVC 4

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 life cycle, 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 ...