As many of you already know Microsoft is working on a MVC Framework for ASP.Net. MVC stands for “Model View Controller”. The Model View Controller is a design pattern and the idea is to separate business logic from the View (The View is the page that will display content, for example an .aspx page). The MVC in general maintain a clean separation of concerns, it will be easier to test business logic because it’s separated from the View and the View will not have any knowledge of the underlying model. Today when we build ASP.Net applications we have a code-behind which is a partial class of the “View”. With the code-behind model we can’t easy use Test Driven Development (TDD) or unit-test, at least is not easy. We can use the MVP (Model View Presenter), but that require us to write some extra code. With the MVC Framework it will be much easier to apply TDD.

The ASP.Net MVC Framework is integrated with ASP.Net and can use existing infrastructure like caching, session and profile etc. It will also support static and dynamic languages. The MVC Framework will only as it looks now work on ASP.Net 3.5. The .Net 3.5 will be released within any weeks now. The final build of the framework was done only some days ago. With the MVC Framework we will get a Project Template and great tool support. The MVC Framework is extensible and pluggable, so we can replace any system components, it also support Inversion Of Control (IoC)/Dependency Injection (DI). It’s the lifecycle that makes the model extensible. It looks like this:

Request -> Route (IRouteHandler) –> ControlFactory (IControllerFactory) -> Controller (IController) -> ViewFactory (IViewFactory) -> View (IView) -> Response

The Web Server gets browser request, for example http://localhost/Product, the Route to Controller is determined. The Controller is activated and the “Action” method on Controller is invoked. The Controller will then access the model. The Controller will then render View and passing in custom ViewData to the View. The View is rendered.
When we use the MVC Framework we will not specify an URL to a specific page and pass QueryStrings etc. Instead we use a cleaner URL. For example: http://localhost/Products or http://localhost/Producsts/Edit/4 etc.
We will map this URL to a specific controller which will be executed when we enter the URL. In the Global.asax we can create routes, which will be handled by an IRouteHandler. The following is the default way to add a route:

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
            RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route {
                Url = "[controller]/[action]/[id]",
                Defaults = new { action = "Index", id = (string)null },
                RouteHandler = typeof(MvcRouteHandler)
            });
 }

The Route that is added to the RouteTable will use an URL with the following format “[controller]/[Action]/[id]”. The controller is the controller that should be used, the action is the method in the controller that should be executed and the id is a value that can be passed to the controller’s method. If we use this format and enter a URL like the following: http://localhost/Product, the MVC Framework’s IControlleFactory will create and return the controller that belongs to the Product. It will try to locate a controller with the name ProductController. So if you enter an URL like http://localhost/Customer, it will try to instantiate a controller with the name CustomerController. When the controller is instantiated the Index method of the controller will be executed. The Defaults property of the Route class specify the default settings for the route, such as which action method of the controller is the default action (in this case the Index is the default one specified, this can also be specified on a controller with an attribute.), and the default values of the action method’s parameters that should be passed to the method. If we specify a URL like this one: http://localhost/Product/List the List method of the ProductController will be executed instead of the one that is default specified on the Route. The format of the URL specified for the Route was [controller]/[action]/[id], and the [action] in the format specifies which part of the URL is the name of the action method that should be executed. The [id] in the URL is the name of the action method’s parameter and the value enter at this location of an URL will be passed to the action method. If we enter a URL like this one: http://localhost/Product/Edit/4, the Edit method of the ProductController will be executed and the value 4 will be passed as a value to the Edit method’s id argument. The interface of the action method will look like this:

public void Edit(int? id)

We can of course change the format of the URL if we want to pass more values to a controller’s action method, for example:

“[controller]/[action]/[id]/[pageIndex]”.

The RouteHandler property of the Route specifies which IRouteHandler we want to use.

If we don’t need to use the format “[controller]/[action]/[id]”, for example instead of letting the URL have the name of the controller we can skip the [controller] from the URL and instead specify the type of the controller we want to use when we setup the Route. For example:

RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route {
        Url = "products/[category]",
        Defaults = new {
               controller = "Product",
               action = "Index"
          },
          RouteHandler = typeof(MvcRouteHandler)
});

Now when we have looked at how we can map a URL to a controller we can take a look at how we can implement a controller. A controller is a normal class that inherits the base class Controller located in the System.Web.Mvc namespace:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace MyControllers
{
    public class ProductController : Controller
    {
    }
}

An action method is a normal method that has the ControllerActionAttribute specified. The ControllerActionAttribute is used because of security reason so not anyone can enter an action in the URL and execute it. The ControllerActionAttbibute has some properties also, for example the DefaultAction which can be used to specify the default action method of the controller.

[ControllerAction(DefaultAction = true)]
 public void Index()
 {
        RenderView("MyView");
 }

The RenderView method will render the specified view. In this case the view with the name “MyView”. The RenderView will not do a call to Response.Redirect; instead it will use the Server.Execute method. By default the RenderView will look into a sub folder of your project with the name Views and then the sub folder with the name of the controller attached to the view.

/root
    /Views
          /Product
             MyView.aspx

The RenderView method is located in the Controller’s base class. This method will execute the IView’s RenderView method. We can create our own IViewFactory which will return our IView representation where we can create our own implementation of the RenderView. For example if we want to render a view based on another format than HTML, for example a jpg or gif image etc. We can create our own IView and make sure our RenderView will render binary data to the output stream instead of text.

The code-behind of the View inherits form the ViewPage instead of the Page object.

To send data to the View that should be displayed we can use the ViewData property of the Controller base class, or we can pass our data to the RenderView method:

[ControllerAction]
public void List(int? page)
 {
       PagedList<Product> products = repository.GetProducts(page ?? 0, 10);
       RenderView("List", products);
 }

 [ControllerAction]
 public void Edit(int id)
 {
        Product product = repository.GetProductByID(id);
         RenderView("Edit", product);
 }

[ControllerAction]
public void ShowCustomer(int? id)
{
    ...
    ViewData["CustomerName"] = customer. Name;
    RenderView("ShowCustomer");
}

To display this information in our View we can user server side script block:

<table class="product_listing">
        <tr>
            <th></th>
            <th>Product Name</th>
            <th>Unit Price</th>
        </tr>
       
        <% foreach(var p in ViewData) { %>
       
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <%=Html.Link("Edit", "Products", new { Action="Edit", ID=p.ProductID }) %>
                </td>
                <td><%=p.ProductName %></td>
                <td><%=p.UnitPrice.ToCurrency() %></td>
            </tr>
       
        <% } %>
       
</table>

<h2><%=ViewData.ProductName %></h2>

<h1><%=ViewData["CustomerName"] %></h1>

By using the ViewData collection we can pass several of objects to our view that should be displayed. If we want to pass typed data to the View, we can inherit the Controller<T> where ViewData will be of type T. If we use the Controller<T>, the page which uses the Controller<T> needs to inherit the ViewPage<T> instead of ViewPage.

The MVC Framework doesn’t support postbacks and the use of ViewState, so most of the Controls shipped with ASP.Net can’t be used. Microsoft will probably add new Controls for the MVC Framework.

The MVC Framework will be added to the SP1 of VS 2008. This framework is for people that would like to use this MVC design pattern instead of the postback model. The MVC Framework will work better with Test Driven Development and unit-testing, so people that will make it easier to test web apps will also probably use this model. We will use it in every Web project in the future. With this model it would also be easier to maintain applications because we will have more control over the HTML. We don’t need to hook up to an event of a control and try to figure out how to add extra data into a GridView if we want to extend it etc. This model reminds of the old classic ASP, and it will be easier for people that work with classic ASP to move to ASP.net if they start using the MVC Framework.

Testing with MVC will as we mentioned before be much easier. We have several of interfaces that we can use. The Mockable intrinsic objects are IHttpContext, IHttpResponse and IHttpRequest. Because the MVC Framework have interfaces for IRouteHandler, IController, IControllerFactory, IView and IVewFactory we have more extensibility options. If we want to test a Controller’s action we can for example create our own IViewFactory and IView, by doing this we can change the implementation of the RenderView method.

[TestMethod]
Public void TestTheEditActionFotTheProductContoller()
{
    ProductController controller = new ProductController(mpr);

    TestViewEngine testView = new TestViewEngine();
    controller.ViewFactory = testView

    controller.Edit(5);

    Assert.Equal(testView.Template, "Edit");
    Asssert.Equal(testView.GetViewData<Product>().ProductID, 5);
}

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If you have a model object with a property named id, you may have run into an issue where your model state is invalid when binding to that model even though you don’t have an “Id” field in your form.

The following scenario should clear up what we mean. Suppose you have the following simple model with two properties.

public class Product {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

And you are creating a view to create a new Product. In such a view, you obviously don’t want the user to specify the Id.

<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%>

   <fieldset>
     <legend>Fields</legend>

     <div class=”editor-label”>
       <%= Html.LabelFor (model => model.Name) %>
     </div>
     <div class=”editor-field”>
       <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %>
       <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %>
     </div>

     <p>
       <input type=”submit” value=”Create” />
     </p>
   <fieldset>

<% } %>

However, when you post it to an action method like so:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Index(Product p)
{
    if (!ModelState.IsValid) {
        throw new InvalidOperationException(“Modelstate not valid”);
    }
    return View();
}

You’ll find that the model state is not valid. What gives!?

Well the issue here is that the id property of Product is being set to an empty string. Why is that happening when there is no “Id” field in your form? The answer to that, my friend, is routing.

When you crack open a freshly created ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application, you’ll notice the following default route defined.

routes.MapRoute(

    “Default”
    “{controller}/{action}/{id}”;
    new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id = “” }
);

To refresh your memory, that’s a route with three URL parameters (controller, action, id), each with a default value ("home", "index", "").

What this means is if you post a form to the URL /Home/Index, without specifying an “ID” in the URL, you’ll still have an empty string route value for the key “id”. And as it turns out, we use route values to bind to action method parameters.

In the scenario above, it just so happens that your model object happens to have a property with the same name, “Id”, as that route value, so the model binder attempts to set the value of the id property to empty string, and since id is non-nullable int, we get a type conversion error.

In ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2, we added an MVC specific means to work around this issue via the new Url.Parameters.Optional. If you set the default value for a URL parameter to this special value, MVC makes sure to remove that key from the route value dictionary so that it doesn’t exist.

Thus the fix to the above scenario is to change the default route to:

Routes.MapRoute(

    “Default”,
    “{controller}/{action}/{id}”,
    new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id =
UrlParameter.Optional }
);

With this in place, if there’s no ID in the URL, there won’t be a value for ID in the route values and thus we’ll never try to set a property named “Id” unless you have a form field named “Id”.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Introduction

Beyond a doubt, it was a great revolution that the ASP.NET technique substituted the traditional ASP approach in constructing web applications. Later, the full-fledged framework, Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 came into being, which brought many wonderful and excellent features as well as efficient tools to developers so that they can succeed in building a basic ASP.NET web application in just a few minutes.

At the same time as it provides popular object-oriented programming features, ASP.NET delivers a wealth of goodies, tools, and powerful system features. For example, lots of programmer-friendly classes let you develop pages using typical desktop-like methods, and the Web Forms model supplies an overall event-driven approach which seems quite comfortable to desktop application developers.

However, in November 2007, a group of ASP.NET guys invented some new ASP.NET MVC stuff. And shortly after the announcement of the new framework, millions of ASP.NET programmers from all over the world published their blogs focusing upon this framework by presenting elementary sample projects, digging into the components of the MVC architecture, introducing other related third party helper or extension tools, and so forth.

Now, let's first recall and enumerate the main strong points that ASP.NET Web Forms gives us.

The Strong Points of ASP.NET Web Forms

In general, the Web Forms-based framework offers the following advantages:

1. The Event Model

Web Forms supports an event model that preserves state over HTTP, which benefits line-of-business related web applications development. The Web Forms-based application provides dozens of events that are supported in hundreds of server controls. As you've seen, because the Windows Forms model stems from the typical event-driven desktop programming style, it facilitates millions of developers from the VB6 world.

2. The Page Controller Pattern

Web Forms uses a Page Controller pattern that adds functionality to individual pages. As you've also seen, an ASP.NET page is divided into two parts: the .aspx itself, and the relevant CodeBehind .aspx.cs (or .aspx.vb) file, with the former acting as the front view and the latter as the controller (which resembles the View and the Controller in the ASP.NET MVC term). Similar to the controller in the MVC case, the CodeBehind .aspx.cs (or .aspx.vb) file plays the role of a broker (the controller) that schedules the .aspx view page and the back end business logic (which in turn attaches to the various database storage areas).

We can say that, although the new ASP.NET MVC provide a clearer division for the Model, View, and Controller, the Page Controller pattern of Web Forms is still good. Under the .NET platform, we don't need to implement the MVC pattern by ourselves. As for the View, ASP.NET already provides the common Web controls, and also, we can define the custom user controls by deriving them from System.Web.UI.UserControl, or create our own Web controls from System.Web.UI.WebControl. Then we can assemble the UserControl or Web controls with an .aspx Page.

On the other hand, ASP.NET defines the System.Web.UI.Page class which, to some degree, acts as the Controller of the MVC pattern, which can deal with user requests. In addition, the code-behind technique can completely separate the rendering of the user interface from the implementation of the UI logic, which greatly facilitates handling the code.

As for the Model component, it should include the field objects of the business logic tier, as well as the data objects of the data access tier. And moreover, the .NET platform provides the DataSet-like objects through ADO.NET, which facilitates the binding with the data source of the Web controls.

3. The ViewState and Server-based Forms

Web Forms uses ViewState or server-based forms, which, to a great degree, make managing state information easier. As is well known, HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means two successive requests across the same session have no knowledge of each other. By introducing the re-entrant form mechanism, ASP becomes successful in working around such a system limitation. What was once an ASP best practice has been standardized and integrated into the ASP.NET runtime to become the key feature of ASP.NET applications with automatic state maintenance.

The ASP.NET runtime carries the page state back and forth across page requests. When generating HTML code for a given page, ASP.NET encodes and stuffs the state of server-side objects into a few hidden, and transparently created, fields. When the page is requested, the same ASP.NET runtime engine checks for embedded state information-the hidden fields-and uses any decoded information to set up newly created instances of server-side objects. However, it's just such kinds of ViewState-related items that brought ASP.NET Web Forms plenty of issues when it's compared with ASP.NET MVC. This will be discussed in just a few moments. 

4. A Large Share of The Component Marketplace

Web Forms works well for small teams of Web developers and designers, who want to take advantage of the large number of components available for rapid application development. As is the case with Visual Basic (under which a large number of third-party components came into existence), mature ASP.NET techniques have resulted in a large marketplace of third-party server controls and components.

Therefore, it's a very real advantage that, with the already-existing ASP.NET solutions and various third-party components, a medium-sized ASP.NET application may be built within just a few days. 

5. Less Complex

In contrast to the newly-introduced ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms is less complex for application development, because the components (the Page class, controls, and so on) are tightly integrated and usually require less code than the MVC model.

At the same time, however, ASP.NET Web Forms has also produced some real problems, mainly centering around low response speed and inefficiency in setting up large web applications.

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One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don’t like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline.

In this post we are going to show 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

1. RouteConstraint

Usually you could put some constrains on url parameters using regular expressions, but if your constrains depend on something that is not only about the single parameter, you can implement the IRouteConstrains’s method and put your validation logic in it.

One example of this is the validation of a date: imagine an url that has year, month and date on different url tokens, and you want to be able to validate that the three parts make a valid date.

2. RouteHandler

Not really specific to ASP.NET MVC, the RouteHandler is the component that decide what to do after the route has been selected. Obviously if you change the RouteHandler you end up handling the request without ASP.NET MVC, but this can be useful if you want to handle a route directly with some specific HttpHanlders or even with a classic WebForm.

3. ControllerFactory

The controller factory is the component that, based on the route, chooses which controller to instantiate and instantiate it. The default factory looks for anything that implements IController and whose name ends with Controller, and than create an instance of it through reflection, using the parameter-less constructor.

But if you want to use Dependency Injection you cannot use it, and you have to use a IoC aware controller factory: there are already controller factory for most of the IoC containers. You can find them in MvcContrib or having a look at the Ninject Controller Factory.

4. ActionInvoker

ActionInvoker is responsible for invoking the action based on it’s name. The default action invoker looks for the action based on the method name, the action name and possibly other selector attributes. Then it invokes the action method together with any filter defined  and finally it executes the action result.

If you read carefully you probably understood that most of the execution pipeline is inside the logic of the default ControllerActionInvoker class. So if you want to change any of these conventions, from the action method’s selection logic, to the way http parameters are mapped to action parameters, to the way filters are chosen and executed, you have to extend that class and override the method you want to change.

5. ActionMethodSelectorAttribute

Actions, with the default action invoker, are selected based on their name, but you can finer tune the selection of actions implementing your own Method Selector. The framework already comes with the AcceptVerbs attribute that allows you to specify to which HTTP Verb an action has to respond to.

A possible scenario for a custom selector attribute is if you want to choose one action or another based on languages supported by the browser or based on the type of browser, for example whether it is a mobile browser or a desktop browser.

6. AuthorizationFilter

These kind of filters are executed before the action is executed, and their role is to make sure the request is “valid”.

There are already a few Authorization filters inside the framework, the most “famous” of which is the Authorize attribute that checks whether the current user is allowed to execute the action. Another is the the ValidateAntiForgeryToken that prevents CSRF attacks. If you want to implement your own authorization schema, the interface you have to implement is IAuthorizationFilter. An example could be the hour of the day.

7. ActionFilter

Action Filters are executed before and after an action is executed. One of the core filters is the OutputCache filter, but you can find many other usages for this filter. This is the most likely extension point you are going to use, as, IMHO, it’s critical to a good componentization of views: the controller only has to do its main stuff, and all the other data needed by the view must be retrieved from inside action filters.

8. ModelBinder

The default model binder maps HTTP parameters to action method parameters using their names: a http parameter named user.address.city will be mapped to the City property of the Address object that itself is a property of the method parameter named user. The DefaultModelBinder works also with arrays, and other list types.

But it can be pushed even further: for example you might use it to convert the id of the person directly to the Person object looking up on the database. This approach is explained better in the following post Timothy Khouri (aka SingingEels): Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC. The code is based on the preview 5, but the concept remains the same.

9. ControllerBase

All controllers inherit from the base class Controller. A good way to encapsulate logic or conventions inside your actions is to create you own layer supertype and have all your controllers to inherit from it.

10. ResultFilter

Like the ActionFiters, the ResultFilters are execute before and after the ActionResult is executed. Again, the OutputCache filter is an example of a ResultFilter. The usual example that is done to explain this filter is logging. If you want to log that a page has been returned to the user, you can write a custom RenderFilter that logs after the ActionResult has been executed.

11. ActionResult

ASP.NET MVC comes with many different kind of results to render views, to render JSON, plain text, files and to redirect to other actions. But if you need some different kind of result you can write your own ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method. For example, if you want to send a PDF file as result you could write your own ActionResult that use a PDF library to generate the PDF. Another possible scenario is the RSS feed: read more about how to write a RssResult in this post.

Look at implementing a custom action result when the only peculiarity is how the result is returned to the user.

12. ViewEngine

Probably you are not going to write your own view engine, but there are a few that you might consider using instead of the default WebForm view engine.

13. HtmlHelper

Views must be very dumb and thin, and they should only have html markup and calls to HtmlHelpers. There should be no code inside the views, so helpers come very handy for extracting the code from the view and putting it into something that is testable.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

Introduction

At DevConnections Fall and TechEd Europe, Microsoft recently unveiled the ASP.NET MVC Framework. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is one of the most popular design patterns for decoupling data access and business logic from data presentation

and user interaction. At the time of this writing, the framework is not available yet, not even as a CTP. However, the first CTP is expected to ship in just a few weeks.

In any case, the ASP.NET MVC Framework is definitely worth a look since it addresses aspects of programming that are extremely important for developers and their productivity such as code reusability, testing, and separation of presentation and business logic concerns. At the same time, an early look at the MVC Framework may generate good feedback to Microsoft and help them to deliver a better and richer product in full accordance with the community expectations and needs.

Motivating the Hype on MVC

Most applications, and especially Web applications, have their presentation layer mixed up with some business logic and data access code. As an example, think of a classic ASP.NET page. You define the user interface by composing and configuring server controls until you obtain the desired markup. Next, you use a code-behind class to add some handlers for the various events fired by controls and provide any required glue code. In such pages, more often than not, data access code is interspersed with presentation logic. In ASP.NET 2.0, the introduction of data source controls certainly didn't make this mixture more unlikely. Some data source controls, such as the SqlDataSource control, are a sinful temptation for developers as they see in it the way to go down to SQL queries and stored procedures - the raw data - very quickly. Without beating the bush around, such ASP.NET pages whose code-behind classes contain a mixture of presentation, business and data access code, are quite difficult to maintain. And they are definitely challenging to test appropriately.

User interface facilities (i.e., wizards and tools in Visual Studio) tend to encourage developers to put in the presentation layer more than it should. The presentation layer acts as a catch-all for logic that reasonably belongs to other layers. At the end of the day, you can still have the application working and perform well. Behind the scene, though, you get a too high level of coupling and subsequently high costs of maintenance. What if, in fact, at some point you need to add a new feature or re-implement an existing one? Not having a well designed structure of classes and lacking a clean separation of presentation, business and data layers, most that you can do is cutting and pasting code and run pages over and over again to test results against expectations.

There's not much of reusability too, but quite the reverse we'd say. Code duplication is not unlikely and the need of changing the view for the same data may often result in serious trouble.

Sure, there are architectural design patterns to give you guidance on the best way to design Web applications with cleanly separated layers. However, these patterns require a lot of coding, sometimes repetitive code, which doesn't always sit well with the rush of delivering applications that just work. While the startup costs of implementing recognized patterns manually will certainly pay you off in the context of complex enterprise applications, it seems to be an unnecessary complication in simpler, but still realistic, scenarios.

The classic code-behind model of ASP.NET provides the tools for building great and well-designed applications, but it leaves most of it up to the individual developer or team. As a result, too many applications out there work well, but are not well designed. Over the years, this fact raised the need of a radically different approach to Web programming. The MVC pattern was soon identified as an excellent approach to Web development. MVC ensures a clean separation between the data model and the user interface in such a way that changes to the user interface don't affect data handling. At the same time, the data model and related access code can be refactored without the need of changing the user interface accordingly.

Where Did We See This Already?

Tools like Castle MonoRail have been created to simplify Web development by leveraging the MVC pattern. Where's the difference between MonoRail and ASP.NET? It mostly lies in an extremely simplified form of the code that backs a page up. It's like breaking the code you have in, and reference from, the code-behind class into distinct elements. The controller handles application flow; the model represents the data; the view takes care of presentation. The underlying engine automates some tasks for you (i.e., binding data to form elements) and exposes just plugs for you to connect and customize the engine. As a result, you write less code and have highly specialized components that are easier to test and maintain.  

At the same time, MonoRail is not necessarily better than Web Forms and may not be the right choice for just everybody. Because it propounds a different paradigm, it may not be the ideal environment for those who have strong ASP.NET skills and find it difficult (or just not affordable) to convert large applications.

By the way, regardless of the Mono prefix in the name there's no necessary connection between this project and the Mono project aimed at providing the code to run .NET applications on multiple platforms.

Comparing the MVC Framework to Classic ASP. Net

The ASP.NET MVC Framework is essentially the Microsoft's attempt to create an ASP.NET programming environment centered around the MVC pattern. For the time being (nobody can reasonably foresee future evolutions), the MVC Framework should be considered an alternative to Web Forms. To some extent, the MVC Framework and Web Forms have in common more or less what cars and motorcycles share. Both can take you somewhere else, but with different speed, comfort, sense of freedom, size of the trunk.

The MVC Framework doesn't support classic postbacks and viewstate and doesn't consider any URL as the endpoint to a physical server file to parse and compile to a class. In ASP.NET, you have a 1:1 correspondence between a URL and a resource. The only exception to this rule is when you use completely custom HTTP handlers bound to a particular path.

In the MVC Framework, a URL is seen as the mean to address a logical server resource, but not necessarily an ASPX file to parse. So the URLs employed by the pages of an MVC Framework application have a custom format that the application itself mandates. In the end, the MVC Framework employs a centralized HTTP handler that recognizes an application-specific syntax for links. In addition, each addressable resource exposes a well-known set of operations and a uniform interface for executing operations.

Have you ever heard about Representational State Transfer, or REST for short?

Well, REST is an architectural pattern that defines how network resources should be defined and addressed in order to gain shorter response times, clear separation of concerns between the front-end and back-end of a networked system. REST is based on three following principles:

1. An application expresses its state and implements its functionality by acting on logical resources
2. Each resource is addressed using a specific URL syntax
3. All addressable resources feature a contracted set of operations

As you can see, the MVC Framework fulfills it entirely.

So here's an alternate way of looking at the MVC Framework. It is an ASP.NET framework that performs data exchange by using a REST model versus the postback model of classic ASP.NET. Each page is split into two distinct components -controller and view - that operate over the same model of data. This is opposed to the classic code-behind model where no barrier is set that forces you to think in terms of separation of concerns and controllers and views. However, by keeping the code-behind class as thin as possible, and designing the business layer appropriately, a good developer could achieve separation of concerns even without adopting MVC and its overhead. MVC, however, is a model superior to a properly-done code-behind for its inherent support for test-driven development.

While MVC is definitely a key part of the framework, we wouldn't consider it is the most compelling part. REST is a possible alternative to the postback model, whereas MVC is an alternative to code-behind.

Explaining the MVC Framework to ASP. Net Developers

We wonder what's the quickest and most effective way to explain the MVC Framework to seasoned ASP.NET developers. It's like having a central HTTP handler that captures all requests to resources identified with a new extension. This HTTP handler analyzes the syntax of the URL and maps it to a special server component known as the controller. The controller supports a number of predefined actions. The requested action is somehow codified in the URL according to an application-specific syntax. The central HTTP handler invokes the action on the controller and the controller will process the request up to generating the response in whatever response format you need. The response is generated through a view component.

What here we called the "central HTTP handler" plays the same role that was of the System.Web.UI.Page class in classic ASP.NET. The Page is the handler responsible for any .aspx request and generates the markup using the code-behind class and serves it back using postbacks. In the MVC Framework, this pattern - hard-coded in the ASP.NET runtime and not subject to change until the whole ASP.NET platform is rewritten - is simply implemented using an alternative HTTP handler and an alternative model based on REST and MVC.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

Introduction

At DevConnections Fall and TechEd Europe, Microsoft recently unveiled the ASP.NET MVC Framework. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is one of the most popular design patterns for decoupling data access and business logic from data presentation

and user interaction. At the time of this writing, the framework is not available yet, not even as a CTP. However, the first CTP is expected to ship in just a few weeks.

In any case, the ASP.NET MVC Framework is definitely worth a look since it addresses aspects of programming that are extremely important for developers and their productivity such as code reusability, testing, and separation of presentation and business logic concerns. At the same time, an early look at the MVC Framework may generate good feedback to Microsoft and help them to deliver a better and richer product in full accordance with the community expectations and needs.

Motivating the Hype on MVC

Most applications, and especially Web applications, have their presentation layer mixed up with some business logic and data access code. As an example, think of a classic ASP.NET page. You define the user interface by composing and configuring server controls until you obtain the desired markup. Next, you use a code-behind class to add some handlers for the various events fired by controls and provide any required glue code. In such pages, more often than not, data access code is interspersed with presentation logic. In ASP.NET 2.0, the introduction of data source controls certainly didn't make this mixture more unlikely. Some data source controls, such as the SqlDataSource control, are a sinful temptation for developers as they see in it the way to go down to SQL queries and stored procedures - the raw data - very quickly. Without beating the bush around, such ASP.NET pages whose code-behind classes contain a mixture of presentation, business and data access code, are quite difficult to maintain. And they are definitely challenging to test appropriately.

User interface facilities (i.e., wizards and tools in Visual Studio) tend to encourage developers to put in the presentation layer more than it should. The presentation layer acts as a catch-all for logic that reasonably belongs to other layers. At the end of the day, you can still have the application working and perform well. Behind the scene, though, you get a too high level of coupling and subsequently high costs of maintenance. What if, in fact, at some point you need to add a new feature or re-implement an existing one? Not having a well designed structure of classes and lacking a clean separation of presentation, business and data layers, most that you can do is cutting and pasting code and run pages over and over again to test results against expectations.

There's not much of reusability too, but quite the reverse we'd say. Code duplication is not unlikely and the need of changing the view for the same data may often result in serious trouble.

Sure, there are architectural design patterns to give you guidance on the best way to design Web applications with cleanly separated layers. However, these patterns require a lot of coding, sometimes repetitive code, which doesn't always sit well with the rush of delivering applications that just work. While the startup costs of implementing recognized patterns manually will certainly pay you off in the context of complex enterprise applications, it seems to be an unnecessary complication in simpler, but still realistic, scenarios.

The classic code-behind model of ASP.NET provides the tools for building great and well-designed applications, but it leaves most of it up to the individual developer or team. As a result, too many applications out there work well, but are not well designed. Over the years, this fact raised the need of a radically different approach to Web programming. The MVC pattern was soon identified as an excellent approach to Web development. MVC ensures a clean separation between the data model and the user interface in such a way that changes to the user interface don't affect data handling. At the same time, the data model and related access code can be refactored without the need of changing the user interface accordingly.

Where Did We See This Already?

Tools like Castle MonoRail have been created to simplify Web development by leveraging the MVC pattern. Where's the difference between MonoRail and ASP.NET? It mostly lies in an extremely simplified form of the code that backs a page up. It's like breaking the code you have in, and reference from, the code-behind class into distinct elements. The controller handles application flow; the model represents the data; the view takes care of presentation. The underlying engine automates some tasks for you (i.e., binding data to form elements) and exposes just plugs for you to connect and customize the engine. As a result, you write less code and have highly specialized components that are easier to test and maintain.  

At the same time, MonoRail is not necessarily better than Web Forms and may not be the right choice for just everybody. Because it propounds a different paradigm, it may not be the ideal environment for those who have strong ASP.NET skills and find it difficult (or just not affordable) to convert large applications.

By the way, regardless of the Mono prefix in the name there's no necessary connection between this project and the Mono project aimed at providing the code to run .NET applications on multiple platforms.

Comparing the MVC Framework to Classic ASP. Net

The ASP.NET MVC Framework is essentially the Microsoft's attempt to create an ASP.NET programming environment centered around the MVC pattern. For the time being (nobody can reasonably foresee future evolutions), the MVC Framework should be considered an alternative to Web Forms. To some extent, the MVC Framework and Web Forms have in common more or less what cars and motorcycles share. Both can take you somewhere else, but with different speed, comfort, sense of freedom, size of the trunk.

The MVC Framework doesn't support classic postbacks and viewstate and doesn't consider any URL as the endpoint to a physical server file to parse and compile to a class. In ASP.NET, you have a 1:1 correspondence between a URL and a resource. The only exception to this rule is when you use completely custom HTTP handlers bound to a particular path.

In the MVC Framework, a URL is seen as the mean to address a logical server resource, but not necessarily an ASPX file to parse. So the URLs employed by the pages of an MVC Framework application have a custom format that the application itself mandates. In the end, the MVC Framework employs a centralized HTTP handler that recognizes an application-specific syntax for links. In addition, each addressable resource exposes a well-known set of operations and a uniform interface for executing operations.

Have you ever heard about Representational State Transfer, or REST for short?

Well, REST is an architectural pattern that defines how network resources should be defined and addressed in order to gain shorter response times, clear separation of concerns between the front-end and back-end of a networked system. REST is based on three following principles:

1. An application expresses its state and implements its functionality by acting on logical resources
2. Each resource is addressed using a specific URL syntax
3. All addressable resources feature a contracted set of operations

As you can see, the MVC Framework fulfills it entirely.

So here's an alternate way of looking at the MVC Framework. It is an ASP.NET framework that performs data exchange by using a REST model versus the postback model of classic ASP.NET. Each page is split into two distinct components -controller and view - that operate over the same model of data. This is opposed to the classic code-behind model where no barrier is set that forces you to think in terms of separation of concerns and controllers and views. However, by keeping the code-behind class as thin as possible, and designing the business layer appropriately, a good developer could achieve separation of concerns even without adopting MVC and its overhead. MVC, however, is a model superior to a properly-done code-behind for its inherent support for test-driven development.

While MVC is definitely a key part of the framework, we wouldn't consider it is the most compelling part. REST is a possible alternative to the postback model, whereas MVC is an alternative to code-behind.

Explaining the MVC Framework to ASP. Net Developers

We wonder what's the quickest and most effective way to explain the MVC Framework to seasoned ASP.NET developers. It's like having a central HTTP handler that captures all requests to resources identified with a new extension. This HTTP handler analyzes the syntax of the URL and maps it to a special server component known as the controller. The controller supports a number of predefined actions. The requested action is somehow codified in the URL according to an application-specific syntax. The central HTTP handler invokes the action on the controller and the controller will process the request up to generating the response in whatever response format you need. The response is generated through a view component.

What here we called the "central HTTP handler" plays the same role that was of the System.Web.UI.Page class in classic ASP.NET. The Page is the handler responsible for any .aspx request and generates the markup using the code-behind class and serves it back using postbacks. In the MVC Framework, this pattern - hard-coded in the ASP.NET runtime and not subject to change until the whole ASP.NET platform is rewritten - is simply implemented using an alternative HTTP handler and an alternative model based on REST and MVC.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

The application is intentionally simple. The goal was to provide members of the ASP.NET community with an application that they could use to quickly learn how to build new applications with ASP.NET MVC.

The Contact Manager application is an address book application. The application enables you to list, create, edit, and delete contacts.

We built the application over multiple iterations. With each iteration, we gradually improved the application. The goal of this multiple iteration approach was to enable you to understand the reason for each change.

Literation 1:
Create the application. In the first iteration, we create the Contact Manager in the simplest way possible. We add support for basic database operations: Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD).

Literation 2:
Make the application look nice. In this iteration, we improve the appearance of the application by modifying the default ASP.NET MVC view master page and cascading style sheet.

Literation 3:
Add form validation. In the third iteration, we add basic form validation. We prevent people from submitting a form without completing required form fields. We also validate email addresses and phone numbers.

Literation 4:
Make the application loosely coupled. In this third iteration, we take advantage of several software design patterns to make it easier to maintain and modify the Contact Manager application. For example, we refactor our application to use the Repository pattern and the Dependency Injection pattern.

Literation 5:
Create unit tests. In the fifth iteration, we make our application easier to maintain and modify by adding unit tests. We mock our data model classes and build unit tests for our controllers and validation logic.

Literation 6:
Use test-driven development. In this sixth iteration, we add new functionality to our application by writing unit tests first and writing code against the unit tests. In this iteration, we add contact groups.

Literation 7:
Add Ajax functionality. In the seventh iteration, we improve the responsiveness and performance of our application by adding support for Ajax.

Each literation has an associated tutorial.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!