.net code 128 High-speed beginner ramp-up in Visual Studio .NET

Make Code 128A in Visual Studio .NET High-speed beginner ramp-up

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 of the benefits you ll learn about:

Full control over HTML Full control over URLs Better separation of concerns Extensibility Testability

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

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 view-specific model, which you ll learn about in the next chapter. The view A visual representation of a model, given some context. It s usually the resulting HTML that the framework renders to the browser, such as the HTML representing the blog post. Controller The controller A mediator. The controller processes input, acts upon the model, and decides what to do render a view, redirect somewhere else, and so on. View Model The controller might pull the most recent comments for a blog Figure 1.1 The relationship between the model, post and send them to a view.

view, and controller. The solid lines indicate a direct association, and the dashed lines indicate an indirect association. (Graphic and description used with permission from Wikipedia.)

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.

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.

NOTE The rest of this book assumes that you have ASP.NET MVC 2 installed,

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. 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:

Content Static files such as CSS and images Controllers Your application s controller classes Models Your application s models Scripts JavaScript files Views Your application s views

Take a look at the folder structure for a minute. You ll work with this structure for all your 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. The initial request to the application was made to / (the root of the site). We can check the routes to see how the application responds to URLs. Routes are a way for you to customize the URLs that users use when interacting with your site. You ll learn about routing in depth in chapter 16, but we ll cover what you need to know to get started. Routes are (by default) defined in the Global.asax. Open this file and you should see the code shown in listing 1.1.