MVC, You’re a … Rock Star (Everybody wants U)

It’s hard to go anywhere right now and not see MVC center stage, bathed in bright flashing neon lights. The .NET community seems to be adopting this faster than many expected. There was a lot of speculation that MVC would end up being the country cousin of the more popular ASP.NET WebForms. That it could only hope for a small percentage of marketshare when it came to a MS solution for the web. Well fast forward a year and a half all the buzz has catapulted MVC from certified-underground to “Cool Kid”cult status. If there is a machine behind MVC you’d have to agree that it was the community. MVC, We Made You.

If like me you heard the buzz and downloaded the beta at any of the varying stages, you’ll appreciate the mainstream love headed MVC’s way. A sure sign of that love are the number of blog posts, tweets and, remixes ( MvcContrib/CodePlex) Many of the books aren’t out yet but here is a short list with links. I’ll do a quick review of one in particular which is the “MEAP” ASP.NET MVC in Action by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard.

Cover and Chapters(Click to enlarge)

The items in red were missing from the Early-release version I read. If you order the book I expect the chapters might change slightly and those missing will happily be complete. Items in green are a must read. Items in white are specific to the issue and you can go back to these chapters when you need that knowledge.

Overall

I liked this book a lot. I read it over the span of a few hours and I didn’t skip much aside from the chapters in white above. The first 100 pages are PERFECT. They cover everything you’ll need to get busy coding. I like that. Some books expect us to read books cover to cover and ration the goodies. We like easy books that give it up right away. This is probably the only time I’ll ever get to say anything like that.

Get the book if you are familiar with some of the approaches the authors like, or if you want to get an advanced alt.net style approach to implementing mvc.No wizards here.

They embrace a lot of different concepts along the way.If you get the MAEP version, expect to see some omissions, errors. The book doesn’t come with recipes which I would have liked to see.

Code Swag Rating

4 daps out of 5

Keep reading for more…

What to expect

• A strong vision as to how to approach developing MVC applications.
• Leans heavily toward the type of programming and principles you would expect from the authors(see their blogs)
• Test Driven Development
• Patters and Principles
• Best Practices ( web, design, development and framework specific practices to adopt)
• Customization (where the framework falls short )

Target Audience

• Definitely an intermediate developer with:Strong knowledge of ASP.NET framework
• General understanding of Test Driven Development
• General understanding of Dependency Injection/Inversion of ControlGeneral knowledge of HTML
• General knowledge of jQuery
• General knowledge of Domain Driven Design, specifically the Repository Pattern

What not to expect
If you like these types of books then you might want to get this one only as a secondary reference.

• Step-by-step instructions on how to develop an application
• One starter application used throughout the book

Products, Tools, Frameworks, Books, Websites the book introduces/supports

If you are (or want to be ) familiar with these, this is the book you want. It uses these frameworks and concepts to help demonstrate how to leverage the MVC framework

• Castle Windsor
• MbUnit/nUnit
• Resharper
• Domain Driven Design
• Applying Domain Driven Design
• MVCContrib
• StructureMap
• RhinoMocks

Reason I bought this book

All of the above! I wanted a certain explanation of how to use the framework. Waht more advanced users are doing and how they do it. I did not want a book that starts at Hello World and then leaves you to actually figure most of the framework on your own with google, red eyes and caffeine-fueled nights. I really wanted to know about the MVC framework in context of principles/patterns that I already adopt and want to adopt in this framework. So this was the book I bought. Not to say anything bad about the Hack/Hanselman/Conery effort because I almost bought it. I haven’t read it but I have read that kind of book before and I’m usually left with paragraph style discussion about Methods, classes with simple focused examples. However to use these examples in the real world you would still need a book that is not so focused on the small things. Again, I almost bought it but once I saw MVC in action, the decision was made.So, in short, if you want to learn the framework AND how to use it in context of the approach described above, this is the book for you.

But… nothing is perfect

There is always room for improvement. In the screen shot above the book covers a few things in too much detail and other less so. There was also a disjointed feeling between chapters. For instance in the beginning the first author leans towards a lot of customized code (MVC Contrib) very early after introducing the framework, I’d want to learn about what is there first then how to improve on it. Later in the book the same topic is revisited but using the framework this time not the custom code. There are some typo’s and missing screen shots in the MAEP version which is to be expected.I would like to have had at least some recipes instead of nothing. Some exercises e.t.c. I happen to have a project I’m working on already so I don’t really want to use it as a playground it would have been nice to have a small challenge at the end of the chapter to practice with. I do believe this might be on the way judging by some of the references in the code ( they may be downloadable at some point )

Other MVC Books

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0

by Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

by Steven Sanderson

ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed

by Stephen Walther

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