Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Chapter 3. Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC

After reading the first two chapters of the book, you should now have a good understanding of the general principles behind the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and how ASP.NET MVC differs from traditional ASP.NET, particularly regarding the use of WebForms. You are now ready to get started with ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC consists of a set of concepts and corresponding techniques that help you implement an application. It is not possible to cover all these aspects in one chapter, but this chapter gives you some grounding in and simple examples of the fundamentals of ASP.NET MVC to prepare you for the rest of the book. It's important to read this chapter carefully and to understand its points very well because you deal with these concepts frequently throughout the book. In the next few chapters, you use some of the basic concepts in examples that are discussed later, and you need to have the background from this chapter to understand them.

You start with installing ASP.NET MVC on a machine and creating a new ASP.NET MVC application and then examining the structure of an ASP.NET MVC project. You also take a look at test projects and their key role in ASP.NET MVC development. Right after this, you step into more details about the general structure of the main elements of a solution (such as the controller, view, and model) to give you a good perspective about these basic elements. There is also a discussion that covers Web configuration files ...