Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework phần 1 pps

Through discussion, documentation, and a substantial hands-on tutorial, you’ll learn about • The MVC Framework’s powerful facilities, including routing, controllers, filters, views, and

this print for content only—size & color not accurate spine = 1.174" 616 page count

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Dear Reader,The brand-new ASP.NET MVC Framework represents the biggest shift in Microsoft web development since ASP.NET was first released in 2002 It gives

us far greater control over our HTML markup, our URL schema, and our use

of requests and responses It promotes clean application architecture, has deep support for unit testing, and makes it easy to integrate with third-party JavaScript libraries and Ajax toolkits

I’ve written this book because I’m excited about ASP.NET MVC I hope that

by reading it, you’ll gain not only the deepest understanding of what ASP.NET

MVC offers and how to use it, but also why it was designed this way, and how

you can apply its principles to improve your own code Because I’m independent

of Microsoft, I can freely analyze what works well, what limitations you might encounter, and what alternatives or open source tools you might need to add in

Through discussion, documentation, and a substantial hands-on tutorial, you’ll learn about

• The MVC Framework’s powerful facilities, including routing, controllers, filters, views, and model binding

• Architecture: The model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, loose coupling, testability, test-driven development (TDD), and relevant design patterns

• Extending and customizing the MVC Framework’s request processing pipeline

• Securing your MVC application and deploying it to Windows Server

• Using core ASP.NET platform features in an MVC application

• Integrating with or migrating from older ASP.NET applicationsThis book assumes that you have a working knowledge of C# (although LINQ and the new syntaxes are covered briefly) and some web development experi-ence If you’ve previously used traditional ASP.NET, also known as WebForms, that’s better still Enjoy,

THE APRESS ROADMAP

Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce in C#

Beginning ASP.NET 3.5

in C# 2008

Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components

Pro ASP.NET 3.5

in C# 2008

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Steven Sanderson

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Copyright © 2009 by Steven Sanderson

All rights reserved No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrievalsystem, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4302-1007-8

ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-1008-5

Printed and bound in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Trademarked names may appear in this book Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence

of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademarkowner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark

Lead Editor: Ewan Buckingham

Technical Reviewer: Andy Olsen

Editorial Board: Clay Andres, Steve Anglin, Mark Beckner, Ewan Buckingham, Tony Campbell,

Gary Cornell, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Michelle Lowman, Matthew Moodie, Duncan Parkes,Jeffrey Pepper, Frank Pohlmann, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Matt Wade, Tom WelshProject Manager: Sofia Marchant

Copy Editor: Damon Larson

Associate Production Director: Kari Brooks-Copony

Production Editor: Laura Esterman

Compositor: Molly Sharp

Proofreader: Lisa Hamilton

Indexer: BIM Indexing and Proofreading Services

Artist: April Milne

Cover Designer: Kurt Krames

Manufacturing Director: Tom Debolski

Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 233 Spring Street, 6th Floor,New York, NY 10013 Phone 1-800-SPRINGER, fax 201-348-4505, e-mail orders-ny@springer-sbm.com,

The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty Although every

precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author(s) nor Apress shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be causeddirectly or indirectly by the information contained in this work

The source code for this book is available to readers at http://www.apress.com

For Zoe, without whose love, support, and hard work this project would not have been possible Thank you!

Contents at a Glance

About the Author xviii

About the Technical Reviewer xix

Acknowledgments xx

Introduction xxi

PART 1 ■ ■ ■ Introducing ASP.NET MVC ■ CHAPTER 1 What’s the Big Idea? 3

■ CHAPTER 2 Your First ASP.NET MVC Application 15

■ CHAPTER 3 Prerequisites 37

■ CHAPTER 4 SportsStore: A Real Application 81

■ CHAPTER 5 SportsStore: Navigation and Shopping Cart 121

■ CHAPTER 6 SportsStore: Administration and Final Enhancements 171

PART 2 ■ ■ ■ ASP.NET MVC in Detail ■ CHAPTER 7 Overview of ASP.NET MVC Projects 203

■ CHAPTER 8 URLs and Routing 221

■ CHAPTER 9 Controllers and Actions 259

■ CHAPTER 10 Views 321

■ CHAPTER 11 Data Entry 369

■ CHAPTER 12 Ajax and Client Scripting 419

■ CHAPTER 13 Security and Vulnerability 459

■ CHAPTER 14 Deployment 477

■ CHAPTER 15 ASP.NET Platform Features 505

■ CHAPTER 16 Combining MVC and WebForms 555

■ INDEX 573

v

About the Author xviii

About the Technical Reviewer xix

Acknowledgments xx

Introduction xxi

PART 1 ■ ■ ■ Introducing ASP.NET MVC ■ CHAPTER 1 What’s the Big Idea? 3

A Brief History of Web Development 3

Traditional ASP.NET 4

What’s Wrong with Traditional ASP.NET? 4

Web Development Today 5

Web Standards and REST 6

Agile and Test-Driven Development 6

Ruby on Rails 6

Key Benefits of ASP.NET MVC 7

Model-View-Controller Architecture 7

Extensibility 8

Testability 8

Tight Control over HTML 8

Powerful New Routing System 9

Built on the Best Parts of the ASP.NET Platform 9

.NET 3.5 Language Innovations 10

ASP.NET MVC Is Open Source 10

Who Should Use ASP.NET MVC? 10

Comparisons with ASP.NET WebForms 11

Comparisons with Ruby on Rails 11

Comparisons with MonoRail 12

Summary 13

vii

■ CHAPTER 2 Your First ASP.NET MVC Application 15

Preparing Your Workstation 15

Creating a New ASP.NET MVC Project 16

Removing Unnecessary Files 18

How Does It Work? 19

Rendering Web Pages 20

Creating and Rendering a View 20

Adding Dynamic Output 22

A Starter Application 23

The Story 23

Linking Between Actions 23

Designing a Data Model 25

Building a Form 26

Handling Form Submissions 28

Adding Validation 31

Finishing Off 33

Summary 35

■ CHAPTER 3 Prerequisites 37

Understanding Model-View-Controller Architecture 37

The Smart UI (Anti-Pattern) 38

Separating Out the Domain Model 39

Three-Tier Architecture 40

Model-View-Controller Architecture 41

Variations on Model-View-Controller 43

Domain Modeling 44

An Example Domain Model 44

Entities and Value Objects 45

Ubiquitous Language 45

Aggregates and Simplification 46

Keeping Data Access Code in Repositories 48

Using LINQ to SQL 49

Building Loosely Coupled Components 56

Taking a Balanced Approach 57

Using Inversion of Control 57

Using an IoC Container 60

Getting Started with Automated Testing 61

Unit Tests and Integration Tests 63

The Red-Green Development Style 64

New C# 3 Language Features 68

The Design Goal: Language Integrated Query 68

Extension Methods 68

Lambda Methods 70

Generic Type Inference 71

Automatic Properties 71

Object and Collection Initializers 72

Type Inference 73

Anonymous Types 73

Using LINQ to Objects 76

Lambda Expressions 77

IQueryable<T> and LINQ to SQL 78

Summary 80

■ CHAPTER 4 SportsStore: A Real Application 81

Getting Started 82

Creating Your Solutions and Projects 83

Starting Your Domain Model 85

Creating an Abstract Repository 85

Making a Fake Repository 86

Displaying a List of Products 87

Removing Unnecessary Files 87

Adding the First Controller 88

Setting Up the Default Route 89

Adding the First View 90

Connecting to a Database 92

Defining the Database Schema 92

Setting Up LINQ to SQL 94

Creating a Real Repository 95

Setting Up Inversion of Control 97

Creating a Custom Controller Factory 97

Using Your IoC Container 99

Creating Automated Tests 102

Configuring a Custom URL Schema 106

Adding a RouteTable Entry 107

Displaying Page Links 108

Styling It Up 114

Defining Page Layout in the Master Page 114

Adding CSS Rules 115

Creating a Partial View 117

Summary 119

■ CHAPTER 5 SportsStore: Navigation and Shopping Cart 121

Adding Navigation Controls 121

Filtering the Product List 122

Defining a URL Schema for Categories 125

Building a Category Navigation Menu 131

Building the Shopping Cart 140

Defining the Cart Entity 141

Adding “Add to Cart” Buttons 144

Giving Each Visitor a Separate Shopping Cart 146

Creating CartController 148

Displaying the Cart 150

Removing Items from the Cart 153

Displaying a Cart Summary in the Title Bar 154

Submitting Orders 156

Enhancing the Domain Model 157

Adding the “Check Out Now” Button 159

Prompting the Customer for Shipping Details 159

Defining an Order Submitter IoC Component 161

Completing CartController 161

Implementing the EmailOrderSubmitter 167

Summary 169

■ CHAPTER 6 SportsStore: Administration and Final Enhancements 171

Adding Catalog Management 172

Creating AdminController: A Place for the CRUD Features 172

Rendering a Grid of Products in the Repository 175

Building a Product Editor 179

Creating New Products 186

Deleting Products 187

Securing the Administration Features 188

Setting Up Forms Authentication 189

Using a Filter to Enforce Authentication 190

Displaying a Login Prompt 191

Image Uploads 195

Preparing the Domain Model and Database 195

Accepting File Uploads 196

Displaying Product Images 197

Summary 199

PART 2 ■ ■ ■ ASP.NET MVC in Detail

■ CHAPTER 7 Overview of ASP.NET MVC Projects 203

Developing MVC Applications in Visual Studio 203

The Default MVC Project Structure 204

Naming Conventions 207

The Initial Application Skeleton 208

Debugging MVC Applications and Unit Tests 208

Using the Debugger 211

Stepping into the NET Framework Source Code 212

Stepping into the ASP.NET MVC Source Code 213

The Request Processing Pipeline 213

Stage 1: IIS 214

Stage 2: Core Routing 216

Stage 3: Controllers and Actions 216

Stage 4: Action Results and Views 218

Summary 219

■ CHAPTER 8 URLs and Routing 221

Putting the Programmer Back in Control 221

Setting Up Routes 222

Understanding the Routing Mechanism 224

Adding a Route Entry 226

Using Parameters 228

Using Defaults 229

Using Constraints 230

Accepting a Variable-Length List of Parameters 233

Matching Files on the Server’s Hard Disk 234

Using IgnoreRoute to Bypass the Routing System 235

Generating Outgoing URLs 236

Generating Hyperlinks with Html.ActionLink 237

Generating Links and URLs from Pure Routing Data 239

Performing Redirections to Generated URLs 240

Understanding the Outbound URL-Matching Algorithm 241

Generating Hyperlinks with Html.ActionLink<T> and Lambda Expressions 243

Working with Named Routes 244

Unit Testing Your Routes 245

Testing Inbound URL Routing 245

Testing Outbound URL Generation 249

Further Customization 251

Implementing a Custom RouteBase Entry 251

Implementing a Custom Route Handler 252

URL Schema Best Practices 253

Make Your URLs Clean and Human-Friendly 254

Follow HTTP Conventions 255

Search Engine Optimization 257

Summary 258

■ CHAPTER 9 Controllers and Actions 259

An Overview 259

Comparisons with ASP.NET WebForms 260

All Controllers Implement IController 260

The Controller Base Class 261

Receiving Input 262

Getting Data from Context Objects 262

Using Action Method Parameters 264

Invoking Model Binding Manually in an Action Method 265

Producing Output 266

Understanding the ActionResult Concept 266

Returning HTML by Rendering a View 269

Performing Redirections 273

Returning Textual Data 277

Returning JSON Data 279

Returning JavaScript Commands 279

Returning Files and Binary Data 280

Creating a Custom Action Result Type 283

Using Filters to Attach Reusable Behaviors 286

Introducing the Four Basic Types of Filters 286

Applying Filters to Controllers and Action Methods 288

Creating Action Filters and Result Filters 289

Creating and Using Authorization Filters 293

Creating and Using Exception Filters 296

Bubbling Exceptions Through Action and Result Filters 299

The [OutputCache] Action Filter 300

Other Built-In Filter Types 302

Controllers As Part of the Request Processing Pipeline 303

Working with DefaultControllerFactory 303

Creating a Custom Controller Factory 305

Customizing How Action Methods Are Selected and Invoked 306

Testing Controllers and Actions 312

How to Arrange, Act, and Assert 313

Testing a Choice of View and ViewData 313

Testing Redirections 315

More Comments About Testing 316

Mocking Context Objects 316

Summary 320

■ CHAPTER 10 Views 321

How Views Fit into ASP.NET MVC 321

The WebForms View Engine 322

View Engines Are Replaceable 323

WebForms View Engine Basics 323

Adding Content to a View Template 323

Five Ways to Add Dynamic Content to a View Template 323

Using Inline Code 324

Why Inline Code Is a Good Thing in MVC View Templates 326

Understanding How MVC Views Actually Work 326

Understanding How ASPX Templates Are Compiled 327

Understanding ViewData 329

Rendering ViewData Items Using ViewData.Eval 330

Using HTML Helper Methods 332

The Framework’s Built-In Helper Methods 333

Creating Your Own HTML Helper Methods 342

Using Partial Views 344

Creating a Partial View 344

Rendering a Partial View Using Server Tags 349

Using Html.RenderAction to Create Reusable Widgets with Application Logic 351

What Html.RenderAction Does 352

When It’s Appropriate to Use Html.RenderAction 352

Creating a Widget Based on Html.RenderAction 353

Sharing Page Layouts Using Master Pages 355

Using Widgets in MVC View Master Pages 356

Implementing a Custom View Engine 358

A View Engine That Renders XML Using XSLT 358

Using Alternative View Engines 363

Using the NVelocity View Engine 363

Using the Brail View Engine 365

Using the Spark View Engine 366

Using the NHaml View Engine 367

Summary 368

■ CHAPTER 11 Data Entry 369

Model Binding 369

Model-Binding to Action Method Parameters 370

Model-Binding to Custom Types 371

Invoking Model Binding Directly 374

Model-Binding to Arrays, Collections, and Dictionaries 376

Creating a Custom Model Binder 378

Using Model Binding to Receive File Uploads 381

Validation 383

Registering Errors in ModelState 383

View Helpers for Displaying Error Information 386

How the Framework Maintains State in Input Controls 388

Performing Validation During Model Binding 389

Moving Validation Logic into Your Model Layer 390

About Client-Side (JavaScript) Validation 395

Wizards and Multistep Forms 396

Verification 406

Implementing a CAPTCHA 406

Confirmation Links and Tamper-Proofing with HMAC Codes 414

Summary 418

■ CHAPTER 12 Ajax and Client Scripting 419

Why You Should Use a JavaScript Toolkit 419

ASP.NET MVC’s Ajax Helpers 420

Fetching Page Content Asynchronously Using Ajax.ActionLink 421

Submitting Forms Asynchronously Using Ajax.BeginForm 427

Invoking JavaScript Commands from an Action Method 428

Reviewing ASP.NET MVC’s Ajax Helpers 430

Using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC 431

Referencing jQuery 431

Basic jQuery Theory 433

Adding Client-Side Interactivity to an MVC View 438

Ajax-Enabling Links and Forms 442

Client/Server Data Transfer with JSON 449

Fetching XML Data Using jQuery 452

Animations and Other Graphical Effects 453

jQuery UI’s Prebuilt User Interface Widgets 454

Implementing Client-Side Validation with jQuery 456

Summarizing jQuery 458

Summary 458

■ CHAPTER 13 Security and Vulnerability 459

All Input Can Be Forged 459

Forging HTTP Requests 461

Cross-Site Scripting and HTML Injection 463

Example XSS Vulnerability 464

ASP.NET’s Request Validation Feature 465

Filtering HTML Using the HTML Agility Pack 467

Session Hijacking 468

Defense via Client IP Address Checks 469

Defense by Setting the HttpOnly Flag on Cookies 469

Cross-Site Request Forgery 470

Attack 471

Defense 471

Preventing CSRF Using the Anti-Forgery Helpers 472

SQL Injection 473

Attack 474

Defense by Encoding Inputs 474

Defense Using Parameterized Queries 474

Defense Using Object-Relational Mapping 475

Using the MVC Framework Securely 475

Don’t Expose Action Methods Accidentally 475

Don’t Allow Model Binding to Change Sensitive Properties 476

Summary 476

■ CHAPTER 14 Deployment 477

Server Requirements 477

Requirements for Shared Hosting 478

IIS Basics 478

Understanding Web Sites and Virtual Directories 478

Binding Web Sites to Hostnames, IP Addresses, and Ports 480

How IIS Handles Requests and Invokes ASP.NET 480

Deploying Your Application 483

Copying Your Application Files to the Server 484

Using Visual Studio 2008’s Publish Feature 485

Making It Work on Windows Server 2003/IIS 6 486

Making It Work on IIS 7 494

Making Your Application Behave Well in Production 497

Supporting Changeable Routing Configurations 497

Supporting Virtual Directories 498

Using ASP.NET’s Configuration Facilities 498

Controlling Compilation on the Server 502

Detecting Compiler Errors in Views Before Deployment 503

Summary 503

■ CHAPTER 15 ASP.NET Platform Features 505

Windows Authentication 506

Preventing or Limiting Anonymous Access 508

Forms Authentication 509

Setting Up Forms Authentication 510

Using Cookieless Forms Authentication 513

Membership, Roles, and Profiles 514

Setting Up a Membership Provider 516

Using a Membership Provider with Forms Authentication 520

Creating a Custom Membership Provider 521

Setting Up and Using Roles 522

Setting Up and Using Profiles 525

URL-Based Authorization 529

Data Caching 530

Reading and Writing Cache Data 530

Using Advanced Cache Features 533

Site Maps 534

Setting Up and Using Site Maps 535

Creating a Custom Navigation Control with the Site Maps API 536

Generating Site Map URLs from Routing Data 538

Internationalization 540

Setting Up Internationalization 541

Tips for Working with Resource Files 544

Using Placeholders in Resource Strings 545

Performance 546

HTTP Compression 546

Tracing and Monitoring 548

Monitoring Page Generation Times 549

Monitoring LINQ to SQL Database Queries 550

Summary 554

■ CHAPTER 16 Combining MVC and WebForms 555

Using WebForms Technologies in an MVC Application 555

Using WebForms Controls in MVC Views 556

Using WebForms Pages in an MVC Web Application 558

Adding Routing Support for WebForms Pages 559

Using ASP.NET MVC in a WebForms Application 563

Upgrading an ASP.NET WebForms Application to Support MVC 564

Getting Visual Studio to Offer MVC Items 568

Interactions Between WebForms Pages and MVC Controllers 569

Summary 571

■ INDEX 573

About the Author

■ STEVEN SANDERSON first learned to program computers by copyingBASIC listings from a Commodore VIC-20 instruction manual That wasalso how he first learned to read

Steve was born in Sheffield, UK, got his education by studying ematics at Cambridge, and now lives in Bristol He worked for a giantinvestment bank, a tiny start-up company, and then a medium-sized ISVbefore going independent as a freelance web developer, consultant, andtrainer Steve enjoys the UK’s NET community and tries to participate inuser groups and speak at free conferences whenever he has the chance

math-Steve loves all forms of technological progress and will buy any gadget if it has flashing LEDs

About the Technical Reviewer

■ ANDY OLSEN is a freelance developer and consultant based in the United Kingdom Andy has

been working with NET since the beta 1 days and has coauthored and reviewed several books

for Apress, covering C#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET, and other topics Andy is a keen football and

rugby fan and enjoys running and skiing (badly) Andy lives by the seaside in Swansea with his

wife, Jayne, and children, Emily and Thomas, who have just discovered the thrills of surfing

and look much cooler than he ever will!

Acknowledgments

Getting this book published was a real team effort I’ve been greatly impressed by the wholeApress crew: Sofia did a fantastic job of keeping the whole project on course, patiently replot-ting the schedule every time it had to change Damon herded every comma and caption intoits right place, and tactfully removed many of my British expressions that would have baffledmost readers Laura cheerfully accepted an endless stream of last-minute edits to the beauti-fully typeset PDFs Ewan advocated the project from the start My technical reviewer, Andy,had great insight into how much detail was needed in each explanation, and was relentlesslythorough in verifying the correctness of my work Needless to say, any technical errors in thisbook will be the ones that I secretly inserted after Andy had completed his reviews

Many readers have already provided feedback on early drafts of this book publishedthrough Apress’s Alpha Program You all deserve credit, because you’ve helped to improve thequality and consistency of explanations and terminology used throughout

We all owe thanks to certain Microsoft staff, not just for giving us an excellent new webdevelopment framework, but also for the way they did it Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie, and theirfrighteningly smart team continually responded to customer feedback during the develop-ment process, bravely putting their work-in-progress on show every two months, no matterwhat criticisms they had to field They challenged our view of Microsoft by releasing the wholeframework’s source code on http://codeplex.com/, and dramatically supported the opensource community by shipping jQuery as a supported, endorsed add-on

The final credit goes to Zoe, my wife, who took on the practical burdens of both ourlives so that I could always keep writing I’m pretty sure she put more work into this projectthan I did

Introduction

We’ve waited a long time for this! The first rough early preview release of ASP.NET MVC was

made public in December 2007, and immediately the software development world was filled

with eager enthusiasm for it Could this be the most exciting advancement in Microsoft web

technology since ASP.NET itself was born way back in 2002? Would we, at last, have a web

development framework that encourages and supports high-quality software engineering?

Since then, we’ve had five further community technology preview (CTP) releases, onebeta release, two release candidates, and now at last in March 2009, the finished 1.0 release

Some releases were just incremental improvements on their predecessors; others were

sub-stantial shifts in the framework’s mechanics and aesthetics (e.g., the whole notion of model

binding, covered in Chapter 11, didn’t appear until preview 5) At each stage, the ASP.NET MVC

team invited feedback and guided their development efforts according to real-world usage

experiences Not all Microsoft products are built this way; consequently, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is

much more mature than the average 1.0 release

I started work on this book in December 2007, foolishly anticipating a summer 2008 lication date With every new preview release, the whole manuscript was updated, reworked,

pub-expanded, polished even more—sometimes even whole chapters became obsolete and simply

had to be discarded The project became so ingrained into my life that every conversation

with friends, family, or colleagues began by them asking “How’s the book?” shortly followed by,

“Tell me again—what’s the book about?” I hope that this finished manuscript, created in

par-allel with ASP.NET MVC itself, gives you not just a clear understanding of what the framework

does today, but also why it was designed this way and how the same principles can improve

the quality of your own code

Who This Book Is For

This book is for professional software developers who already have a working understanding of

C# and general web development concepts such as HTML and HTTP Ideally, you’ll have used

traditional ASP.NET (which these days is known as WebForms, to distinguish it from MVC), but

if you’ve used PHP, Rails, or another web development platform, then that’s fine too

All of the code samples in this book are written in C# That’s not because Visual Basic

or any other NET language is inadequate, but simply because C# is by far the most popular

choice among ASP.NET MVC programmers Don’t worry if you haven’t used LINQ or NET 3.5

yet—the relevant new C# 3 syntaxes are covered briefly at the end of Chapter 3 However, if

you’re totally new to C#, you might also like to pick up a copy of Pro C# 2008 and the NET 3.5

Platform, Fourth Edition, by Andrew Troelsen (Apress, 2007).

Finally, I will assume that you have a reasonable level of passion for your craft I hopeyou’re not satisfied just to throw together any old code that appears at first to work, but

instead would prefer to hone your skills by learning the design patterns, goals, and principles

underpinning ASP.NET MVC This book frequently compares your architectural options,aspiring to help you create the highest-quality, most robust, simple, and maintainable codepossible.

How This Book Is Structured

This book comes in two parts:

• Chapters 1 through 6 are intended to get you up to speed with the big ideas in ASP.NETMVC and its relationship with modern web application architecture and testing Four ofthese chapters are hands-on tutorials grounding those ideas in real application build-ing These six chapters should be read sequentially

• Chapters 7 through 16 then dig deep into each major technology area in the MVCFramework, exploring how you can get maximum benefit from almost every frameworkfeature The last few chapters describe important ancillary topics such as security,deployment, and integrating with or migrating from legacy WebForms code These tenchapters should make sense whether you read them sequentially or dip in and out asneeded

Customer Support

Apress always values hearing from its readers, and wants to know what you think about thisbook—what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you think could be done better nexttime You can send your comments by e-mail to feedback@apress.com Please be sure to men-tion the book title in your message

Contacting the Author

You can e-mail me at mvc@stevensanderson.com, or contact me through my blog at

http://blog.stevensanderson.com I’ll do my best to reply even if sometimes there’s a bit

of a delay before I can do so!

If you’re looking for general ASP.NET MVC support, then instead please use the product’sonline forum, at http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx

What’s the Big Idea?

ASP.NET MVC is a web development framework from Microsoft that combines the

effective-ness and tidieffective-ness of model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, the most up-to-date ideas and

techniques from agile development, and the best parts of the existing ASP.NET platform It’s a

complete alternative to “traditional” ASP.NET WebForms, delivering considerable advantages

for all but the most trivial of web development projects

A Brief History of Web Development

To understand the distinctive aspects and design goals of ASP.NET MVC, it’s worth considering

the history of web development so far—brief though it may be Among Microsoft’s web

devel-opment platforms, we’ve seen over the years an ongoing increase in power and (unfortunately)

complexity As shown in Table 1-1, each new platform tackled the specific shortcomings of its

Time Period Technology Strengths Weaknesses

Jurassic Common Gateway

Interface (CGI)*

SimpleFlexibleOnly option at the time

Runs outside webserver, so is resourceintensive (spawnsseparate OS process perrequest)

Low-levelBronze age Microsoft Internet

Database Connector(IDC)

Runs inside web server Just a wrapper for SQL

queries and templatesfor formatting result set

1996 Active Server Pages (ASP) General-purpose Interpreted at runtime

Encourages “spaghetticode”