Building Web Apps With ASP.NET MVC3

BANGALORE, INDIA: One of the things Microsoft did for the Web development world was bring in the ASP series of programming methodologies. I call it this and not a language since each iteration had many different languages to choose from. Classic ASP had JavaScript and VBScript, ASP.NET had C# and VB.NET among the many other .NET languages.

The ASP series of web development made it easier and easier for developers to create a Web application for different purposes. ASP.NET in particular made it easy for developers to quickly create sites using drag and drop of controls and writing event handlers — very much like writing a Windows application itself. Microsoft has introduced another method by which you can create Web applications. This uses a very well-known design pattern called MVC.

MVC stands for an architecture design pattern called Model-View-Controller. In this pattern, the controller is the one that does all the work for taking decisions, navigating to locations, and generally providing the flow of the application. Think of this as the “Business Logic” center of the application. The Model is the structure of the data that the controller works with.

The model not only contains the structure of the actual data store (database, Web service, et al.) but also the methods required to interact with the data store to both read data and change data (in other words, the CRUD operations). Finally, the View talks to the controller, gets the Model that it needs to show and then displays it to the user. The view by itself never makes a decision other than that required for presentation to the user.

One of the things that ASP.NET (in the Web Forms mold) was unable to do give tight control over the HTML generated by the controls. Not only that, although you could separate code from markup (code-behind versus the ASPX file), you couldn't really differentiate the application into a multi-layer architecture easily. The syntax also made it difficult to really move into the multi-layered architecture even if taking precautions for doing so.

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