In my last blog post I talked about how I chanced upon ASP.Net MVC at my last project and my thoughts on whether a development group should consider it as a design choice for their future projects. In fact few months have passed since I wrote the last blog post, and ASP.Net MVC has taken another leap with MVC 3. From Microsoft’s side there is big push of course and I do see a lot of adoption from development groups in different organizations. There is a learning curve that I see most groups are going through and it can be hard or easy depending on the background that you come from your previous development tasks.
The best way to get started with ASP.Net MVC is if you already are not familiar with MVC as a pattern, familiarize yourself with it. There are several websites that discuss it as a pattern : in the pattern world, it’s more of a ‘framework pattern’ as opposed to a ‘basic pattern’ from the Gang of Four patterns. So based on your level of understanding of patterns, start with Basic patterns aka Gof4 and then understand it as an aggregate pattern of different basic patterns. MVC itself is acheived by different pattern proponents and architects as an aggregate of different types of patterns: like in Head First Design Patterns book, the authors acheive MVC by combining the Observer , Strategy and the Composite pattern. You will observe after your readings that several implementations of MVC are a strong use case of Observer pattern where Views subscribe to changes in the Model – also of Composite patten for the View itself. In the web model though , the use case of Observer pattern may not exist due to the stateless nature of the View. So ASP.Net MVC is one variation of the basic MVC pattern adapted to web paradigm.
It’s the most important step to get as clear an understanding of MVC under the hood from a patterns perspective: this gives a you a much clearer perception of Model, Controller and View , their interaction. You could jump start into it by creating a “Hello World” application in Visual Studio 2008 , 2010 – however it will become very difficult as you go further in accomplishing all your programming functions because the underlying concepts are not clear, especially for those who are used to ASP.Net web forms programming.
Another important start is to pick up a good book , by now there is MVC 3 , however while I am writing this , few good books are out on MVC 2. The ones I read are books by Steve Sanderson and Jeffery Palermo , famous authors. Both are great books in their own regard: Sandeson’s book covers all basics extensively – so read that as your first basic book and Jeffery Palermo’s book covers several advanced topics , like dependency injection , different unit testing methods in a lot more detail. Both will go a long way in getting your foot in the ground , and being well prepared with your project work. I have listed at the end of the blog all the books I read to get up to speed and they helped me a lot. It is good to get few copies of books like this for the whole team and everybody reads it. Of course , there is ton of websites and without a doubt you should follow Scott Gu, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Stack Overflow. The books combined with the websites will give you an understanding of the ASP.Net MVC framework which is written on top of MVC design pattern.
Another new concept that may get thrown at you with ASP.Net MVC is Routing , the ‘RESTful’ way of doing things – it’s undoubtedly a strong concept and you must be very familiar with it from day one. ‘REST’ is meant to be the way Web programming is done – as you progress you will see how important it is for you to be very clear on some concepts like the HTTP methods of GET and POST . WIKIPEDIA itself has some great information on REST , HTTP Methods etc. As far as Routing itself is concerned the the two books I mentioned above do cover it extensively as to how to achieve it with ASP.Net MVC framework.
Here is a list of all the links for References:
Steve Sanderson’s MVC Pro Book
Good Luck With MVC !
SEChannel 