Today I decided to make a small ASP.NET MVC application which would add, edit, delete, and list US states which resided in a SQL Server Express database.  I am a veteran in ASP.NET Web Forms development, so I wanted to see what MVC is like.  I create business objects/models everyday, so understanding models was easy enough.  The tricky part for me was creating and understanding how controllers and views interact with each other.

First Impressions:
1)  I liked the clean separation between controller/view/models.  Basically this is required when using MVC.  I’ve already been accustomed to separating layers, so this wasn’t new to me, but seeing how the MVC Framework has this built in was refreshing.
2)  When I created a new MVC Web Application, it automatically prompted to create a Test project.  I thought that was pretty neat.  I’m not experienced in creating automated test yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there soon and just seeing the parallelism with MVC and testing was impressive.
3)  REST (Representational State Transfer) URLs was interesting.  Apparently you can configure how requests are mapped to controllers in the Global.asax.  I didn’t get into this much as I took the defaults, but simply editing a state looked like such: “/states/Edit/1”.  No more mapping to a template/resource.
4)  You can generate a view straight from the controller by right-clicking when you return an ActionResult.  Visual Studio will then prompt/ask you what kind of view you want to make and you can also have it create a strongly typed view so that you can access the model’s properties.  So the framework can assist in starting a view pretty quickly for you.
5)  Not having view state and post backs was really nice.  The rendered HTML was very clean.
6)  I was confused at times as to how the framework knew what to pass to controller routines on a form post and also how id’s work.  What if you have more than 1 property that makes up the id?  I imagine this would come with time.

Overall I enjoyed the initial experience and it seemed very structured.  I feel that one day doesn’t do it justice as MVC is a bit more complex than web forms.

Helpful Resources:
1)  Scott Guthrie’s NerdDinner.com Chapter:  Scott Guthrie wrote a chapter in Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 in which he walks you through step-by-step in creating an MVC web application.  You can download the chapter in PDF and also download the source code if needed.
2)  Simple E-Commerce Storefront Application: This is another Scott Guthrie example, however this example has some nice architecture diagrams that go along with it to explain what’s going on a bit more.

MVCTest_Soln.zip (891.39 kb)

ASP.NET MVC Overview Part 1 (General ASP.NET MVC Overview)
ASP.NET MVC Overview Part 2 (Advantages of MVC and Web Forms)
ASP.NET MVC First Impressions

Traditionally there has been only one approach to develop ASP.NET web applications; web forms.  Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of hype wrapped around this thing called MVC and the fact that it can be used as an approach to develop ASP.NET applications.  What is MVC?  MVC stands for Model-View-Controller.  It is a design pattern which separates an application into 3 logical tiers: domain, input, and presentation.  This isolation between layers yields independent development, testing, and maintenance of each.

Model – The model can be thought of as the business layer.  It performs application logic and is used to maintain the state of the application typically in a database.

View – A view is a component that is used to display the UI which can often be a direct representation of the model’s state.  For an example, the model may return a collection of workers from the database.  The View could display the workers in a GridView/DataGrid.

Controller – The controller ultimately handles and responds to user interaction.  It works with the model based on what the user desires and then renders the appropriate view accordingly.

The ASP.NET MVC Framework is Microsoft’s stab at at creating an ASP.NET programming environment that is centered around the MVC pattern.  So how is the request model different between MVC and traditional web forms?  An ASP.NET web form uses the postback to relay the request and the page’s code behind handles it.  In ASP.NET MVC, REST is used to communicate the request and MVC is used to process it.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer.  In ASP.NET MVC, instead of mapping URLs to ASPX files stored on disk you are mapping URLs to controllers (classes).  The controller will handle what view to render back to the end-user.

ASP.NET MVC Overview Part 1 (General ASP.NET MVC Overview)
ASP.NET MVC Overview Part 2 (Advantages of MVC and Web Forms)
ASP.NET MVC First Impressions