This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What Is ASP.NET MVC?
The Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework is Microsoft's newest framework for building web applications. The ASP.NET MVC framework was designed from the ground up to make it easier to build good software in the sense of good software discussed in this chapter.
The ASP.NET MVC framework was created to support pattern-based software development. In other words, the framework was designed to make it easier to implement software design principles and patterns when building web applications.
Furthermore, the ASP.NET MVC framework was designed to its core to support unit tests. Web applications written with the ASP.NET MVC framework are highly testable.
Because ASP.NET MVC applications are highly testable, this makes the ASP.NET MVC framework a great framework to use when practicing test-driven development.
ASP.NET MVC Is Part of the ASP.NET Framework
Microsoft's framework for building software applications—any type of application including desktop, web, and console applications—is called the .NET framework. The .NET framework consists of a vast set of classes, tens of thousands of classes, which you can use when building any type of software application. For example, the .NET framework includes classes for working with the file system, accessing a database, using regular expressions, and generating images.
The ASP.NET framework is one part of the .NET framework. The ASP.NET framework is Microsoft's framework for building web applications. It contains a set of classes that were created specifically to support building web applications. For example, the ASP.NET framework includes classes for implementing web page caching, authentication, and authorization.
Microsoft has two frameworks for building web applications built on top of the ASP.NET framework: ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC (see Figure 1.1).
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Figure 1.1 The ASP.NET frameworks
ASP.NET MVC is an alternative to, but not a replacement for, ASP.NET Web Forms. Some developers find the style of programming represented by ASP.NET Web Forms more compelling, and some developers find ASP.NET MVC more compelling. Microsoft continues to make heavy investments in both technologies.
The Origins of MVC
The ASP.NET MVC framework is new; however, the MVC software design pattern itself has a long history. The MVC pattern was invented by Trygve Reenskaug while he was a visiting scientist at the Smalltalk group at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He wrote his first paper on MVC in 1978. He originally called it the Thing Model View Editor pattern, but he quickly changed the name of the pattern to the Model View Controller pattern.
The MVC pattern was first implemented as part of the Smalltalk-80 class library. It was originally used as an architectural pattern for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
The meaning of MVC shifted radically when the pattern was adapted to work with web applications. In the context of web applications, the MVC pattern is sometimes referred to as the Model 2 MVC pattern.
The MVC pattern has proven to be very successful. Today, the MVC pattern is used by several popular web application frameworks including Ruby on Rails, Merb, and Django. The MVC pattern is also popular in the Java world. In the Java world, MVC is used in the Struts, Spring, and Tapestry frameworks.
The first major MVC framework for ASP.NET was the open source MonoRail project (see CastleProject.org). There continues to be an active developer community around this project.
The Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework was originally created by Scott Guthrie on an airplane trip to Austin, Texas, to speak at the first Alt.NET conference in October 2007. (Scott Guthrie was one of the creators of ASP.NET.) Scott Guthrie's talk generated so much excitement that the ASP.NET MVC framework became an official Microsoft product. ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was released in the first part of 2009.