Professional ASP.NET MVC 5

Chapter 1Getting Started

—by Jon Galloway

What's In This Chapter?

• Understanding ASP.NET MVC
• An overview of ASP.NET MVC 5
• How to create MVC 5 applications
• How MVC applications are structured

This chapter gives you a quick introduction to ASP.NET MVC, explains how ASP.NET MVC 5 fits into the ASP.NET MVC release history, summarizes what's new in ASP.NET MVC 5, and shows you how to set up your development environment to build ASP.NET MVC 5 applications.

This is a Professional Series book about a version 5 web framework, so we keep the introductions short. We're not going to spend any time convincing you that you should learn ASP.NET MVC. We assume that you've bought this book for that reason, and that the best proof of software frameworks and patterns is in showing how they're used in real-world scenarios.

A QUICK INTRODUCTION TO ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC is a framework for building web applications that applies the general Model-View-Controller pattern to the ASP.NET framework. Let's break that down by first looking at how ASP.NET MVC and the ASP.NET framework are related.

How ASP.NET MVC Fits in with ASP.NET

When ASP.NET 1.0 was first released in 2002, it was easy to think of ASP.NET and Web Forms as one and the same thing. ASP.NET has always supported two layers of abstraction, though:

• System.Web.UI: The Web Forms layer, comprising server controls, ViewState, and so on
• System.Web: The plumbing, which supplies the basic web stack, including modules, handlers, the HTTP stack, ...