ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action 2nd

1

High-speed beginner ramp-up

This chapter covers

 Introducing the MVC pattern

 Dissecting the default application template

 Creating your first ASP.NET MVC 2 project

 Handling user input

 Working with the view

This chapter is intended to provide you with a quick, high-level overview of the ASP.NET MVC

high number of releases, this framework has received quite a bit of feedback and is much

more stable than some other new frameworks from Microsoft, such as Windows Workflow

Foundation. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, a pattern that’s becoming increasingly

popular with web development frameworks.

ASP.NET MVC is both an alternative and a complement to Web Forms, which means you

won’t be dealing with pages and controls, postbacks or view state, or complicated event

lifecycles. Instead, you’ll be defining controllers, actions, and views. The underlying ASP.NET

platform is the same, however, so things like HTTP handlers and HTTP modules still apply,

and you can mix MVC and Web Forms pages in the same application.

We’ll cover all the major features of the framework throughout this book. Here are some

As you read the chapters in this book, these benefits will become increasingly apparent.

For now, we’ll briefly look at the underlying pattern the framework is based on. Why MVC?

Where did it come from?

1.2 The MVC pattern

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern is an adaptation of a pattern generated from the

Smalltalk community in the 1970s by Trygve Reenskaug. It was popularized for use on the

web with the advent of Ruby on Rails in 2003.

The components of MVC are straightforward:

 The model—The “thing” that your software is built around. If you were building a blog,

your models might be post and comment. In some contexts, this might refer to a

might pull the most recent comments for a blog post and send them to a view.

To see how these components interact with each other, take a look at figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The relationship between the model, view, and controller. The solid lines indicate a direct

association, and the dashed lines indicate an indirect association.

Now that you have a rudimentary overview of the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the MVC

pattern in general, you’re armed to create your first project.

1.3 Creating your first ASP.NET MVC 2 project

We’ll create a web application with some guestbook features. Fire up Visual Studio, and go to

File > New Project. You’re presented with the dialog box pictured in figure 1.2.

In the left pane, under Project Types, select Web. In the Templates pane, select ASP.NET

MVC 2 Web Application. Give the application a name and location, and click OK.

You’re greeted with a dialog box (figure 1.3) that asks you if you want to create a unit

test project. Normally we’d recommend creating a unit test project because most nontrivial

projects need automated tests, but to keep this chapter focused, we’ll select No for now.

Figure 1.3 Visual Studio prompts you to create a unit test project. For now, select No.

Your project is ready to go. Visual Studio created a number of folders for you. Let’s

examine them and see what their purposes are:

ASP.NET MVC projects, so everything will eventually look familiar.

The application that Visual Studio has given you is a working sample of the ASP.NET MVC

Framework. That means you can just run it (Ctrl-F5) to see how it works. Go ahead and do

that now.

Your browser should be opened, and you should be looking at a page that looks like

figure 1.4. Notice that the URL is simply http://localhost:port/. No path is specified. Let’s

examine how this view was rendered.

Figure 1.4 The default ASP.NET MVC project template is fully functional.

The initial request to the application was made to / (the root of the site). We can check