Professional ASP.NET MVC 4

Chapter 16

Real-World ASP.NET MVC: Building the NuGet.org Website

What's In This Chapter?

• Source code for the NuGet Gallery
• Source structure
• WebActivator
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Exception logging
• Profiling
• Data access
• Code First Migrations
• Membership
• Other useful NuGet packages

To learn a framework such as ASP.NET MVC, read a book. To learn to use the framework to build a real-world application, read some code. Code from a real-world implementation is a great resource to learn how to make use of the knowledge you learned from books.

The term “real-world” refers to an application that is actively in use and meets a business need — something you can visit now with your browser. In the heat of battle, with deadlines and changing requirements, a real-world application often looks quite a bit different from the contrived applications you see in books.

This chapter reviews a real-world application, warts and all, built with ASP.NET MVC. In fact, if you read Chapter 10, you are probably already familiar with the application. It is the NuGet Gallery. You can visit it at http://nuget.org/ to get a feeling for the public-facing feature set. Members of the ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC team continue to be actively involved in its development.