Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

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Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is a great book for any developer who needs to quickly on this new framework from Microsoft. I was surprised how much I got out of reading this book. I have been dabbling with ASP.NET MVC since the early preview releases on CodePlex, including building a personal project with S#arp Architecture. S#arp uses ASP.NET MVC, T4 templates and NHibernate to build testable, maintainable applications. The book provides a solid foundation on the concepts behind ASP.NET MVC and follows that up with deeper dives into the differenly elements of the framework.

As I said, the beginning of the book gives some background for those not familiar with the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. The authors examine various implementations of MVC and also compare it to the model-view-presenter (MVP) pattern. They also look at some reasons you might choose to use ASP.NET MVC over WebForms (or vice-versa). I think many people have made the assumption that ASP.NET MVC is going to replace ASP.NET WebForms, but I think both will evolve and thrive in the years ahead.

After an overview of how MVC is implemented in ASP.NET, the authors illustrate the role of each of the four main elements of ASP.NET MVC: the model, the view, the controller and the routing system. Routing in MVC is the unsung hero of the framework. It controls the mapping of URLs to controller actions. The book explains how it works and how developers can create their own routing configuration (and why you would want to do so).

Best practices are a major theme in the book. In the next section of the book, the authors talk about unit testing. They cover how MVC lends itself to create maintainable, testable code, how to create unit tests for your MVC projects, and a brief overview of test-driven development with ASP.NET MVC. Examples are given for mocking your objects with Rhino Mocks, using dependency injection (DI) frameworks such as Ninject, and leveraging inversion of control (IoC) containers in conjunction with DI. The authors also explore some custom view engines for ASP.NET MVC, including NHaml, Spark, Brail, and NVelocity. Examples illustrate how to use each of these view engines and compares their syntax. Other points of extensibility (a favorite topic of Keyvan's) within MVC are also explored.

At the end of the book, there are two case studies that were written by the authors to illustrate the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework. Each case study chapter takes the reader from design and through the implementation of each project.

If you have a need to learn ASP.NET MVC quickly or just want to jump in and learn something new, I highly recommend this book.