Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 18. ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC)

In Chapter 17, you read about the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature, which became mature with .NET Framework 4. This chapter introduces the ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) technology that recently reached its 2.0 version, which is a built-in component of Visual Studio 2010. ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was an out-of-band release for Visual Studio 2008. Although the MVC team made ASP.NET MVC 2 available for Visual Studio 2008, too, the version shipping with Visual Studio 2010 utilizes several new features that are released with the ASP.NET 4.0 platform.

After reading this chapter, you will be familiar with the following:

• Introduction to MVC — You will learn about MVC and similar design patterns to understand how ASP.NET MVC differs from the ASP.NET Web Forms approach.

• Creating an MVC 2 application — You will create a very simple web application with MVC 2, and learn about the structure of MVC web projects. In contrast to the file-based request routing, MVC uses a different routing model. As you progress through the example, you will learn about the new routing approach.

• Adding new MVC 2 pages — You will extend the simple web site with a few pages using the cornerstones of MVC applications: models, views, and controllers.

• Customization in MVC 2 — MVC was designed with easy extensibility and customization in mind. Here you will discover that customizing your controllers and the way views render the user interface (UI) is incredibly simple.

• Routing details ...