Professional ASP.NET MVC 4

The MVC Application Structure

When you create a new ASP.NET MVC application with Visual Studio, it automatically adds several files and directories to the project, as shown in Figure 1.14. ASP.NET MVC projects created with the Internet application template have eight top-level directories, shown in Table 1.1.

Figure 1.14

Table 1.1: Default Top-Level Directories

Directory	Purpose
/Controllers	Where you put Controller classes that handle URL requests
/Models	Where you put classes that represent and manipulate data and business objects
/Views	Where you put UI template files that are responsible for rendering output, such as HTML
/Scripts	Where you put JavaScript library files and scripts (.js)
/Images	Where you put images used in your site
/Content	Where you put CSS and other site content, other than scripts and images
/Filters	Where you put filter code. Filters are an advanced feature, discussed in Chapter 14.
/App_Data	Where you store data files you want to read/write
/App_Start	Where you put configuration code for features like Routing, Bundling, and Web API

What If I Don't Like That Directory Structure?

ASP.NET MVC does not require this structure. In fact, developers working on large applications will typically partition the application across multiple projects to make it more manageable (for example, data model classes often go in a separate class library project ...