Archive for aspnetmvc tag

ASP.NET MVC preview available

December 10th 2007 • .NET (ASP.NET, aspnetmvc) • 1,205 views • 10 responses

The first public preview of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC (model view controller) framework is now available.

Download ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions (EXE) (3.7 MB)

The project takes cues from Ruby on Rail’s success and looks to address dissatisfaction with the testability and maintainability of WebForms applications and provides an alternative approach that is centered around views, models, controllers with a clear separation of concern and the ability to mock test the individual elements.The official documentation is online and there is a great four-part series over at Scott Guthrie’s blog which covers:

Phil Hack and Rob Conery are both now at Microsoft and working on the framework, they have some interesting things to say on it too:

A few other people have already written about the subject too:

Most of the examples and many of the routines/helpers fail to encode output which opens them up to HTML and script injection vulnerabilities. Remember to HttpUtility.HtmlEncode output and use Reflector if you’re unsure whether a function is encoding correctly.

The CTP requires Visual Studio 2008 to get the most out if it so either head over to MSDN Subscriber Downloads or grab a 90-day trial edition if you don’t already have it installed.

[)amien

Observations on Microsoft MVC for ASP.NET

October 9th 2007 • .NET (alt.net, ASP.NET, aspnetmvc) • 4,496 views • 12 responses

Anyone who’s tried to develop large complex web sites with ASP.NET has likely run into many problems covering the page and control life cycle, view state and post backs and subsequent maintainability including the difficulty in creating automated unit tests.

Microsoft, taking a cue from the popularity of Ruby on Rails and subsequent .NET related efforts such as MonoRail, are embracing the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern and developing something more suited to web development than WebForms which aimed to make web development as similar to Windows development as possible (despite the major underlying differences in architecture).

The prototype, currently named System.Web.Mvc ~~or Microsoft.Web.Scalene depending on where you look~~, is headed by Scott Guthrie with both Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman involved (sounds like a dream project and team to be involved with) and a preview release (“drop”) is due within the coming weeks.

Gurthrie and Hanselman presented Microsoft MVC at the Alt.Net conference which revealed some interesting details buried in the video, my rough observations and notes based on the prototype they showed follows:

Philosophy

Don’t repeat yourself
Highly extensible & pluggable
Use generics to achieve strong-typing without code generation
Good performance, fast enough for large-scale sites
Separation of concern for maintainability
Clean URLs in and out
Clean HTML

Extensible

Interfaces used extensively
No sealed classes
Plug-in points for view engines (e.g. MonoRail’s NVelocity, Brail)
Support for Inversion of Control (IoC) engines (e.g. Windsor, StructureMap, Spring.NET)

Compatibility

Runs on the .NET 2.0 CLR
Some helper classes require .NET 3.5 (extension methods)
Normal Request, Response objects (via interfaces for mocking)
Does not support postback (form runat=”server”)
Supports MasterPages, DataBinding, CodeBehind
Existing .aspx’s are blocked using web.config

Visual Studio

Solution templates for web project and unit testing
Full designer & IntelliSense integration

Flow

Route -> ControllerFactory -> Controller -> Action -> ViewEngine -> View

Routing

Routes can be defined dynamically and support RegEx URL matching
IControllerFactory pops out the required IController
Routing is case insensitive by default
Support REST, blog engine, Jango style mappings etc. default is /controller/action/parameters

Controllers

FrontController style
IController exposes:
- Execute(IHttpContext context, RouteData routeData)
- IViewEngine ViewEngine property
Some implementations available, all with virtual methods:
- ControllerBase (adds dispatching)
- Controller (Populate parameters into ViewData["key"])
- Controller<T> (Populates parameters by making ViewData type T)
Attributes
- [ControllerAction] attribute to expose methods as actions (secure default behaviour by not exposing helper methods)
- Attribute for output caching
- [ControllerAction(DefaultAction=true)] to override default method of Index

Parameters (to the controller)

Automatically parsed where a TypeConverter exists
Future versions will support more complex serialization of types
Can be nullable – use null coalesce operator for defaults

View Engine

IViewEngine
- IView LoadView(string viewName)
Implementations include:
- WebFormViewEngine

Views

IView
- virtual void RenderView(object data)
Implementations include:
- ViewPage – pick up parameters from ViewData[""] in conjunction with Controller
- ViewPage<T> pick up parameters from ViewData as type T in conjunction with Controller<T>

HTML

Clean HTML generation (have they sorted out the id mangling by MasterPages/INamingContainer?)
Static Html class supports Link, PagingLinks and Url methods
Map to action names using Lambda expressions to ensure follows refactoring, e.g.
string url – Html.Link<ProductController>(controller =>controller.Edit(4);
Is there a way to follow the default action?

Model/data

Pagination extension methods extend IQueryable for getting pages of data (skip, limit)
Pattern for view-update-view cycle
Object property to form field id mapping available and pluggable, allows
- product.UpdateFrom(Request.Form)

Testing

Easy to write tests by using mock objects (request, response)
Unit testing framework project (NUnit, MBUnit, xUnit.NET)

Finally

What’s with ScottGu’s nametag, can the show’s organisers not afford anything more than a PostIt note?
What cool software is Scott Hanselman using to do the screencast video/zoom/overlay/highlighting?