ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution [Paperback]

Nick Berardi (Author), Al Katawazi (Author), Marco Bellinaso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 22, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0470410957 | ISBN-13: 978-0470410950 | Edition: 1

Perfectly suited to the innovative Problem ? Design ? Solution approach, ASP.NET MVC is a new development model that separates code for the data, look, and business processes of a Web site. This nuts-and-bolts guide thoroughly covers creating a Web site with MVC and discusses solving the most common problems that you may encounter when creating your first application or trying to upgrade a current application. The material is based on the highly praised and widely used ?TheBeerHouse? ASP.NET Starter Kit that was developed in the bestselling ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem?Design?Solution. Additional coverage includes registration and membership systems and user-selectable themes; content management systems for articles and photos; polls, mailing lists, and forums; e-commerce stores, shopping carts, and order management with real-time credit card processing, and more.

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

Wow, I am writing the acknowledgments for this book, that means that ... this book is finally complete.  I am not going to lie, writing a book is a very time consuming process, and for the past year there hasn't been a day that has passed where this book hasn't been in the forethought of my mind.  Mostly because this book has been a constantly evolving concept.  When Jim Minatel first called me a year ago, to write an update to the popular ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming book it started out as a simple update with only a small amount of code changes.  But we quickly realized that to really show the power and grace of ASP.NET MVC we had to do a total rewrite of TheBeerHouse, which was a pretty major undertaking considering that we also had to rewrite a majority of the book.  Combine all this with holding down a full time job, running a growing business, and trying to steal some time to spend with my family, I could have really used an extra hour in each day.

This seems like a good transition for my first acknowledgment, which of course goes to my loving wife, Melinda.  She has been my constant supporter with her love and patience she has shown me throughout this entire process of writing this book.  She also played a large role as my in-house editor who made sure everything I wrote made sense technically and grammatically to the reader.  Amazingly she has put up with this entire process for the last year, and that is why I love her.
Secondly I would like to thank my parents, Anthony & Linda Berardi, who taught me that good things come from hard work and perseverance, without either of these teachings I would have never been able to finish writing this book.  So thank you for your love, guidance, and support over the years, it has helped shape who I am today.

I would also like to acknowledge other family members, in addition to my parents, who have helped shape who I am today:  My grandparents Dominick & Edith Berardi and Ken & Barb Hood, my brother Chris, and my sisters Catie, Terri, and Megan.  All you guys have played a huge role in my life and mean the world to me, so thank you for that. 

Additionally, I would like to thank my wife's parents, Don & Rena Gleiter, for being supportive and understanding about why we've had so little time to visit this past year.  And for the amazing job they did raising their daughter and my wife, Melinda.

The next acknowledgement goes to Sam and Mary Bea Damico, who took a chance, in 2007, and hired me to start and build the technology division of Vovéo (voveo.com) and help make it a natural extension of their already successful marketing division.  Without this necessary support and trust in my judgment, I wouldn't have had the chance to focus on ASP.NET MVC back in December, 2007, and by proxy wouldn't be writing this book.  So thank you Sam and Mary Bea and everybody at Vovéo, you guys played a pivotal role in this book.

My last acknowledgement goes to my best friend, my best man at my wedding, my sidekick since 1995, and now co-author Al Katawazi.  If you weren't my co-author, this book would probably be about half the size it is now. You deserve a thank you, a good beer, and an even better cigar, for all the long nights you put in on this book. I wouldn't have been able to do it without you!
-- Nick Berardi
 
This book was a monumental effort to complete, and I am very thankful for all the support everyone has given me in writing this book. Now that I think about it, writing this book while the MVC Framework was still being developed was an insane task that led to many revisions. My co-author and I have worked very hard to ensure that this book is as up to date as reasonably possible. Now that I have patted my own back I think I will mention some of the real contributors, without which this book would not have been possible. To my wife Heather, I thank you for allowing me the time to write this book, spending late nights reviewing what I had written, and being a great and supportive friend. I'd also like to thank Michael Staley, without his efforts you would have seen far more grammatical errors and typos in my writing, the man is a machine. To Nick Berardi, my best friend since 9th grade, who has been an absolutely critical resource on this project, who has kicked me when I was slacking, and who has been a lot of fun to work with.

On a more abstract level I would like to thank my parents Mohammad and Sarah Katawazi who have always supported me (except that time I joined the army). I would also like to thank both my family and my wife's family for being so understanding these past 12 months while we were preoccupied with this book. And finally to my dog Scout, no matter how many walks or kayaking trips we miss you are always happy to see me. Thanks for being a great friend.
-- Al Katawazi

From the Back Cover

ASP.NET MVC integrates powerful new functionality that enables you to create ASP.NET sites based on the important Model-View-Controller pattern. Beyond just understanding the key MVC benefits and coding techniques, you'll see how to implement the ASP.NET MVC pattern to build a complete real-world site.

Based on Marco Bellinaso's classic TheBeerHouse ASP.NET 2.0 site example, each chapter presents a business requirement for the site, a roadmap for designing a solution, and the code for implementing the features. By the end of the book, you'll have a complete functional site and the skills to build your own ASP.NET MVC content and e-commerce site.

What you will learn from this book

• Techniques for building a flexible, easily configurable, and instrumented site

• How to use jQuery to enhance and extend the capabilities of your ASP.NET MVC site

• How to design a module to manage articles, news, and blog posts

• Tips for creating and managing multiple polls on your site

• Ways to build a robust newsletter system for e-mail newsletters on a background thread

• How to develop a Web 2.0 community-centric forum from scratch

• Steps for adding a working e-commerce store based on PayPal

• All the different ways to deploy an ASP.NET MVC site

Who this book is for
This book is for web developers who are familiar with the basic concepts of web development and ASP.NET. Code examples are shown using C#.

Wrox Problem – Design – Solution references give you solid, workable solutions to real-world development problems. Each is devoted to a single application, analyzing every problem, examining relevant design issues, and implementing the ideal solution.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (June 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470410957
• ISBN-13: 978-0470410950
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,270,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent book, but I prefer Steven Sanderson's book Pro ASP.Net MVC Framework June 28, 2009

By Techie Evan

Format:Paperback

This book builds on existing material from Marco Bellinaso's book, ASP.Net 2.0 Website Programming, migrating the implementation of the BeerHouse eCommerce web application to using more recently released Microsoft technologies such as ASP.Net MVC 1.0, LINQ to SQL, and SQL Server 2008, and updating the text to explain concepts behind the new implementation. As the authors indicated in their introduction to ASP.Net MVC, one thing developers will gain with using this newer technology instead of classic ASP.Net 2.0 is finer control over the web application's client-side code. The flip side to this is that .Net developers, who so far have been relatively shielded from having to know too much about html, css, or javascript because of conveniences offered by classic ASP.Net 2.0, may now have to know more about these technologies in order to develop the presentation logic for their web apps. It's not surprising, therefore, to see a lot more javascript code in the revamped BeerHouse web app. So if you're trying to get a feel for what a non-trivial ASP.Net MVC application might look like and you don't mind reading through the javascript code, the BeerHouse web app presented in this book might be useful to you.

In my opinion, however, despite its title, this book doesn't delve deeply into ASP.Net MVC per se. Compared to Steven Sanderson's book, Pro ASP.Net MVC Framework, this book only provides a superficial introduction to the new framework, and only demos a limited subset of features. With a little more effort and for pedagogic reasons, the authors could have worked into the BeerHouse application showcase examples of how to implement, say: server-side data validation (e.g., use of IDataErrorInfo), or security features such as more advanced model binding that prevents the editing of certain properties, and Cross-Site Request Forgery prevention through the use of the Html.AntiForgeryToken() helper, etc. For a more thorough but still accessible tutorial on ASP.Net MVC, you should get Sanderson's well-written book if you haven't.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great MVC Reference Book October 26, 2009

By C. S. Martin

Format:Paperback

I bought this book as a reference book for the MVC framework and was not disappointed. It has a ton of great examples such as building a forum, a store, articles, security, a content management system, integrating localization and more. The really nice part about the book is each chapter is a standalone how to guide for building a certain website feature. This is a great book to have on your shelf, I use it all the time.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Real Solution for MVC August 7, 2009

By W. Chesher

Format:Paperback

The latest addition to the Problem - Design - Solution series updates TheBeerHouse personalized content site for the [...] MVC Framework. True to the the style of Problem - Design - Solution, the authors focus on a real set of solutions for real problems. The material doesn't dive too deep into the internals of MVC, nor do they assume too much about the user's knowledge.

If you are looking for a primer on MVC, this is not it, but if you are looking to jump into MVC with both feet and you would like to see the capabilities of the MVC Framework in action, this book is a great compliment to your learning process. I would not recommend this book for advanced MVC developers, but it is just right for those who are trying to make the leap from [...] 2.0/3.5 into MVC.