Professional Test-Driven Development with C#: Developing Real World Applications with TDD

WORKING WITH THE ASP.NET MVC

In 1979, while working at Xerox PARC, Trygve Reenskaug, a Norwegian computer scientist, published a paper titled “Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80: How to Use Model-View Controllers.” It was in this paper that Reenskaug formally documented this software design pattern. Even though the MVC design pattern has been around for over 30 years, it has gained popularity recently mostly because of the success of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails helped show developers that highly testable web applications can be created. Developers who use Ruby on Rails are always bragging about how testable their code is. It was only a matter of time before other web platforms implemented MVC frameworks. In 2011, just about every programming language, from Cold Fusion to PHP, has a framework for MVC. The code may look different, but each framework is based on Reenskaug's work. MVC is not just for the web. Many GUI frameworks, including Cocoa (the programming environment for Mac OS X), took inspiration from Reenskaug's Small Talk framework. In Cocoa, developers are encouraged to use this pattern.

In March 2009, Microsoft released the ASP.NET MVC Framework 1.0 to the public. The code was released as open source under the Microsoft Public License, so if you want to see what the framework is doing under the covers, you can have a look. The ASP.NET MVC Framework team is agile, releasing early and often to get feedback from the community. It has been great to see the feedback ...