Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Last week we started a new ASP.NET MVC project here at UruIT.

This new framework for ASP.NET is quite cool. It eliminates the page life cycle, postbacks and viewstate. It divides the architecture in View, Model and Controller.

We have been using MbUnit to test the code. Having these well defined tiers really improves unit testing. We can have an object mock instead of rendering the actual page (View) for testing the Controller and be sure that all the methods are working properly, even before we finish the coding phase.

However the framework is still in Preview (2) and there are lot of changes with each release. The community around MVC is increasing every day but there is still poor documentation for some of the features. For instance, we found several issues when trying to add File Upload functionality to our MVC web site.

Last week Microsoft released the source code for the actual build of this new framework. This will definetely help to understand what is going on behind the scenes.

If you would like to learn more about ASP.NET MVC I can recommend Scott Hanselman videos available at http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-extensions-videos/default.aspx. Scott Guthrie also published some tutorials (a bit out of date and some lines are not working with latest Preview 2 version but it worth a read) at his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/12/asp-net-mvc-framework-road-map-update.aspx

In order to test this MVC Framework you need VS 2008 and the MVC Preview 2 installed in your computer.

Soon I will be posting more about our experiences with MVC.

Have fun

Some good stuff for people who want to start learning about .NET Web Application Development has been added to the newly Microsoft Beginner Developer Learning Center.

New additions include:

1. Five online chapters of “Creating Web Pages for Dummies”.
2. Nine online chapters of “Visual Web Developer for Dummies”.

The MBDL is a .NET centralized resources repository built for those developers who are entirely new to Windows and Web Development, or for example already have some Web Development experience but not using ASP.NET.

Web Development Section is organized in 3 levels (Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3) and cover various aspects of web development, from CSS, HTML and Javascript to installing and using ASP.NET Development tools.

It is not only a great start point for fresh developers but also for ASP.NET developers who are still working in the 1.1 version and need to learn quickly how to use Membership, Gridviews and other features of the 2.0 version.

You will find Tutorials, Videos, Code Samples(C# and VB.NET), Slides and other resources, both for using in online or offline mode.

Visit the Microsoft Beginner Developer Learning Center and take a look, there is for sure, something you will find useful !