Professional ASP.NET MVC 5

Chapter 15Extending MVC

—by Brad Wilson and David Matson

What's In This Chapter?

• Extending models
• Extending views
• Extending controllers

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

All code for this chapter is provided via NuGet, as described in the introduction at the front of this book. Throughout the chapter, NuGet code samples are clearly indicated in applicable sections. You can also visit http://www.wrox.com/go/proaspnetmvc5 for offline use.

One of the lessons underlined in Chapter 1 is about the importance of the layers in the ASP.NET framework itself. When ASP.NET 1.0 came out in 2002, most people did not differentiate the core runtime (that is, the classes in the System.Web namespace) from those of the ASP.NET Web Forms application platform (that is, the classes in the System.Web.UI namespace). The ASP.NET team built the complex abstraction of Web Forms on top of the simple abstraction of the core ASP.NET runtime.

Several newer technologies from the ASP.NET team are built on top of the core runtime, including ASP.NET MVC 5. Everything that's done by the MVC framework can be done by anybody (inside or outside of Microsoft) because it's built on these public abstractions. For the same reasons, the ASP.NET MVC framework is itself made up of several layers of abstractions. This enables developers to pick and choose the pieces of MVC they like and replace or extend the pieces they don't. With each successive version, the MVC team has opened up more of these customization points ...