ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Test Driven Development: Problem - Design - Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

Emad Ibrahim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0470447621 | ISBN-13: 978-0470447628 | Edition: 1

A hands-on journey takes you through the development process of a Web application from concept to production

ASP.NET MVC is a new Web development framework created by Microsoft as an alternative to ASP.NET web forms applications. MVC is well suited to testability, and Test Driven Development (TDD) affords you a generous level of control while also making MVC very powerful and extensible. This book takes the ASP.NET MVC and combines it with a testing methodology and tools and guides you through the process of taking Web application from concept to production.

Using a complete working sample application that demonstrates all the tools needed to build an e-commerce Web application, the popular Problem – Design – Solution format gradually introduces you to new alternative tools, frameworks, and methodologies to get you started creating cutting-edge Web applications.

• ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's hot new Web development framework to use as an alternative to ASP.NET Web forms applications
• Use the popular Problem – Design – Solution recipe and encourages you to get involved with developing a Web application from concept to production
• Introduces new alternative tools, frameworks, and methodologies, such as nUnit and Inversion of Control containers
• Shows you how to use open source JavaScript libraries and work with a mocking framework

As you work with all facets of Web application development-requirements, design, testing, deployment, beta releases, refactoring, tool, and framework selection-you will have developed a live Web application by the time the book is finished.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

ASP.NET MVC offers you control over generated HTML and scripts, clean and user-friendly URLs, and clean separation between your UI and code. While traditional ASP.NET Web Forms are beneficial for rapid web development, they are not test-friendly. Thankfully, Test Driven Development (TDD) and ASP.NET MVC provide you with a reliable methodology that decreases the risk for errors when developing web applications. Together, ASP.NET MVC and TDD are direct and clear about what is happening on your page, what gets rendered, and how it gets there, and they do not allow anything to appear that you didn't put there yourself.

This practical guide shows you how to write a real-world web site from conception to production. After a detailed description of the project you'll build, you'll encounter several problems during the process and learn the tools and techniques necessary to solve them. Each chapter introduces the various concepts and features of ASP.NET MVC that will help you implement a solution to a specific problem. Along the way, you'll be exposed to all facets of web application development, such as requirements, design, testing, deployment, beta releases, refactoring, and tool and framework selection, that will arm you with a thorough understanding of best practices for web development using TDD.

What you will learn from this book

• Ways that ASP.NET MVC is well suited to testability and TDD

• Various concepts such as unit testing frameworks and tools, inversion of control and dependency injection, code coverage, mocking, JavaScript libraries, and Ajax

• How the new features of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 integrate with standard ASP.NET 3.5 features

• How TDD allows you to make changes more frequently and fix bugs easily, while reassuring you that your changes didn't break anything

• How to use various tools and frameworks within your ASP.NET MVC project

• Ways to improve your development experience and code quality

Who this book is for
This book is for developers who are interested in improving their web application development skills. No previous experience of working with ASP.NET MVC is assumed. ASP.NET examples are shown in 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.

About the Author

Emad Ibrahim hates to talk about himself because he doesn't know what to say and how to label himself. He is a programmer, an entrepreneur, a thinker, a dreamer, and a humanist. He is all that and none of that. He is clearly confl icted.
He graduated from Virginia Tech in 1999 without honors and has since worked in small and large companies, in small and large teams. He has written code in coffee shops, libraries, skyscrapers, and basements. He has managed teams across the room, across the country, and across the world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470447621
• ISBN-13: 978-0470447628
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,664,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Emad Ibrahim is a software developer, entrepreneur, and businessman. He is the founder of Yonkly, Inc., a subscription-based, hosted microblogging platform. He has worked in positions of leaderships with several consulting and software development companies large and small including Avanade, Optimal Solutions and Nanocom. Emad is also the author of ASP.NET MVC and Test Driven Development for Wiley/Wrox as well as several articles for online and print magazines including MSDN. Emad graduated from Virginia Tech, where he studied computer engineering. Emad is located in Northern Virginia (DC Metro), is married and has lab mix dog, ironically named Mac.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Practical Exercise in TDD with ASP.NET MVC, September 13, 2009

By 

Elijah Manor (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Test Driven Development: Problem - Design - Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

Before I get into the details of the book, it is important to know that the audience of this book is not for novice programmers or experience non ASP.NET developers. To really get value from this book, you should have some decent exposure to ASP.NET under your belt.

With that said, this book is a very good overview of both ASP.NET MVC and Test Driven Development (TDD). It takes the reader through the process of developing a whole application using the Test First methodology. I found this interesting in that some decisions Emad made initially were later refactored in the book as the application evolved and changed, which is a great way to see the value of TDD and its approach.

This book covers quite a few advanced programming concepts that may be new to you such as various Design Patterns (Strategy, Null Objects, Repository, etc...), Design Principles (Open-Closed Principle, YAGNI, DRY, Inversion of Control, Single Responsibility, Convention Over Configuration, etc...). Emad does a good job about explaining these concepts as he approaches them in the application.

About the same time that I was reading this book, I was in the process of evaluating various tools and frameworks to use for a new ASP.NET MVC v2 project I am working on. I found it interesting that Emad ended up choosing most of the same tools that I had at the time such as: MbUnit, Ninject, Moq, and jQuery. If you are familiar with tools other than the ones he chose at the time of writing this book, you should be able to easily substitute your favorite tool instead. Most of the competitors for these tools have basically the same features.

Since this is a new book, I did run across numerous typos, references to code that wasn't displayed, refactored code that wasn't indicated in the text, and several other minor issues, but all in all I knew what Emad was getting at and it wasn't hard to follow his train of thought. I plan to submit these inconsistencies to the Errata to hopefully clean up these small issues for future printings of this book.

I highly recommend downloading the source code from this book (which you can do for free). It is one of the few projects that I've seen that has a plethora of Unit Tests to look at and get an idea of how to test your ASP.NET MVC project. I've seen numerous other ASP.NET MVC projects that only have a minimal number of Unit Tests and don't really give you a good idea of how you could get good Code Coverage.

If you are interested in getting a jumpstart into both ASP.NET MVC and Test Driven Development, then I think this is a great book for you to get. However, if you aren't so sure about TDD and you just want to get up to speed on ASP.NET MVC, then I might recommend you get one of the other beginning ASP.NET MVC books.

[...]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Far, far too many errors in the code, August 11, 2010

By 

Rune Rindel Hansen (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Test Driven Development: Problem - Design - Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

I had to give up on this book because it contains far, far too many errors in the code.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Stuff..., October 10, 2009

By 

MES "MES" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Test Driven Development: Problem - Design - Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

This book was shorter than I expected (good thing), it doesn't have all the fluff and useless pages that we end up skipping anyway. It was a good walkthrough of using asp.net mvc and tdd from beginning to end.

I specifically liked his first couple of chapters where he sets up the coding environment with all the tools, plus I LOVE his selection of tools and the overview of patterns and best practices in the beginning of the book.