Introduction

We’ve waited a long time for this! The first rough early preview release of ASP.NET MVC was made public in December 2007, and immediately the software development world was filled with eager enthusiasm for it. Could this be the most exciting advancement in Microsoft web technology since ASP.NET itself was born way back in 2002? Would we, at last, have a web development framework that encourages and supports high-quality software engineering?

Since then, we’ve had five further community technology preview (CTP) releases, one beta release, two release candidates, and now at last in March 2009, the finished 1.0 release. Some releases were just incremental improvements on their predecessors; others were sub-stantial shifts in the framework’s mechanics and aesthetics (e.g., the whole notion of model binding, covered in Chapter 11, didn’t appear until preview 5). At each stage, the ASP.NET MVC team invited feedback and guided their development efforts according to real-world usage experiences. Not all Microsoft products are built this way; consequently, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is much more mature than the average 1.0 release.

I started work on this book in December 2007, foolishly anticipating a summer 2008 pub-lication date.With every new preview release, the whole manuscript was updated, reworked, expanded, polished even more—sometimes even whole chapters became obsolete and simply had to be discarded. The project became so ingrained into my life that every conversation with friends, family, or colleagues began by them asking “How’s the book?” shortly followed by, “Tell me again—what’s the book about?” I hope that this finished manuscript, created in par-allel with ASP.NET MVC itself, gives you not just a clear understanding of what the framework does today, but also why it was designed this way and how the same principles can improve the quality of your own code.