Product Description

The Model-View-Controller pattern—universally known as MVC—provides a stable, testable approach to web application development by separating the major functions—or concerns—of an application into independently defined roles.

ASP.NET MVC in Action is a comprehensive guide to MVC-based development using this powerful framework. It offers a clearly-written introduction both to the ASP.NET MVC Framework and to the MVC approach. The focus is on creating real, maintainable web applications—so don't expect toy examples and short snippets. The authors lead you from first-use through real-life scenarios.

One of the key benefits of the MVC approach is introducing a high degree of testability to your applications and process. ASP.NET MVC in Action shows you how to test each piece of your ASP.NET application and how to introduce principles of test-driven development into your process.

Because the framework is completely pluggable, you'll learn how to work with external Inversion of Control containers like StructureMap, Windsor, and Spring.NET and open-source persistence layers like NHibernate. Throughout the book, the authors sprinkle in MvcContrib, an extremely useful tool that provides common extensions so you don't have to write them yourself.

Along the way, you'll benefit from the wide-ranging experience of the authors, who have extensive experience with ASP.NET, Monorail, and Ruby on Rails. This book assumes that you already know how to build a standard ASP.NET application and presents most examples in C#.

What's inside?

1. Getting started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
2. The model in depth
3. The controller in depth
4. The view in depth
5. Routing
6. Customizing and extending the ASP.NET MVC Framework
7. Scaling the architecture for complex sites
8. Leveraging existing ASP.NET features
9. AJAX in ASP.NET MVC
10. Hosting and deployment
11. Exploring MonoRail and Ruby on Rails
12. Best practices
13. Recipes

What reviewers are saying

"Shows how to put all the features of ASP.NET MVC together to build a great application."
-From the Foreword by Phil Haack, Senior Program Manager, ASP.NET MVC Team, Microsoft

"This book put me in control of ASP.NET MVC."
-Mark Monster, Software Engineer, Rubicon

"Highly recommended for those switching from Web Forms to MVC."
-Frank Wang, Chief Software Architect, DigitalVelocity LLC

"I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is serious about building web applications with ASP.NET MVC."
—Jeremy Skinner, ASP.NET developer and technical proofreader of the book

"...does a good job of not only showing you what to do, but also provides cautionary words to avoid poor practices that may lead to maintenance issues on non-trivial applications."
—Venkat Subramanian, NoFluffJustStuff Blogs

"I really enjoyed ASP.NET MVC in Action and highly recommend it for a fresh look at the ASP.NET MVC Framework."
—David Hayden, MVP

"In the end [the authors] not only did an excellent job of putting together a great practical guide to ASP.NET MVC they also successfully embedded some subversive ALT.NET concepts that will hopeful make us all better developers. And at the end of the day that is a damn fine accomplishment."
—Bobby Johnson

"ASP.NET MVC in Action will guide you from your first project through advanced topics such as AJAX and deploying on suboptimal hosting environments. The writing style is clear and concise. Diagrams and code examples are abundant. I recommend it for anyone looking for a great resource for learning about or becoming a better user of the ASP.NET MVC framework."
—Nathan Stott, Partner and Software Engineer at Whiteboard-IT

"I'm very happy with this book. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in ASP.NET MVC. Getting the 'beyond the text' that comes with the CodeCampServer is just icing on the cake, truly."
—Chris Stewart, CompiledMonkey.com

"ASP.NET MVC in Action is a true masterpiece...The authors, Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard are all considered rock stars in the ASP.NET community and they have opened up the doors to their concert with ASP.NET MVC in Action."
—Mohammad Azam, Microsoft MVP

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #130766 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

About the Author

All three authors are popular bloggers and Alt.Net developers. From Houston and Austin, TX, Jeffrey, Ben, and Jimmy are frequent user group and conference speakers. They are also committers to the open-source projects MvcContrib and CodeCampServer.

Jeffrey Palermo is the CTO of Headspring Systems in Austin, Texas. Jeffrey is an MCSD.NET, Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP, Agile Coach, Austin .Net User Group leader, and an INETA speaker. He is an ASP.NET expert and a co-founder of the MvcContrib project. His website, PartyWithPalermo.com was the first ASP.NET MVC application in production.

Ben Scheirman is a Principal Consultant with Sogeti in Houston, Texas. He studied computer science at the University of Houston and is a Certified ScrumMaster and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer. He enjoys speaking and blogging about Agile development topics in .NET.

Jimmy Bogard is a senior consultant with Headspring Systems in Austin, Texas. His focus is using .NET technologies together with Agile methodologies.

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Customer Reviews

MVC as it's meant to be
I was the technical proof-reader for this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

The book starts with an introduction to the core concepts of the MVC Framework (Models, Views and Controllers) and then dives into other techniques that you can use with the framework including routing, unit testing and AJAX. It then moves on to discussing how you can extend the MVC framework and use it in conjunction with various popular open source projects (including Castle, NHibernate and MvcContrib), before comparing it to a couple of other popular MVC frameworks: MonoRail and Ruby on Rails.

The focus here is not simply on introducing you to ASP.NET MVC, but how it can fit in with other techniques and technologies in order to create maintainable web applications.

Note that this is not a book for complete beginners. It moves at quite a rapid pace and right from the start dives into techniques that less-experienced developers may not be familiar with, such as domain-driven-design, object relational mapping and dependency injection. This book is clearly aimed at existing ASP.NET developers who already have a solid background in .NET 3.5 and are now looking to learn about Microsoft's latest offering in the web-development space.

The book comes with a lot of examples (in C#), both sprinkled throughout the text and in the accompanying source code. These examples illustrate the techniques used throughout the book at a good depth. Many of the examples come from the open-source Code Camp Server project, an application for hosting 'code camps' developed by the authors using ASP.NET MVC. This really gives the examples a grounding in reality as it helps to show how you can use MVC alongside other technologies to build a real-world application.

The book is very well written - the authors clearly have a lot of experience with the framework and I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is serious about building web applications with ASP.NET MVC.