ASP.NET MVC: Basics

Welcome to the ASP.NET MVC Basics tutorial. This guide will walk you through the fundamental concepts of building web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern with ASP.NET Framework.

What is MVC?

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern separates an application into three interconnected components:

Model: Represents the data and the business logic of the application. It is responsible for managing the data, retrieving it from a data source, and updating it.
View: Responsible for presenting the data to the user. It's typically a user interface element like an HTML page. Views are generally passive and don't contain much logic beyond presentation.
Controller: Acts as an intermediary between the Model and the View. It receives user input, processes it (often by interacting with the Model), and then selects the appropriate View to render the response.

Analogy: Think of ordering food at a restaurant.

Model: The kitchen, preparing your food (the data).
View: The menu and the plated dish you receive (how the data is presented).
Controller: The waiter, taking your order, communicating with the kitchen, and bringing you the food (handling requests and responses).

Benefits of MVC

Using the MVC pattern offers several advantages:

Separation of Concerns: Makes code more organized, easier to maintain, and testable.
Parallel Development: Developers can work on the Model, View, and Controller simultaneously.
Code Reusability: Models and controllers can be reused across different views.
Testability: The separation of logic makes unit testing more straightforward.

ASP.NET MVC Framework

ASP.NET MVC is a lightweight, open-source framework that implements the MVC pattern for building dynamic websites. It gives you a powerful, pattern-based way to build dynamic websites that enables clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Key Components in ASP.NET MVC

Controllers

Controllers handle incoming browser requests. They are classes that contain action methods. An action method is a public method on a controller that handles a specific HTTP request.


public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!";
        return View();
    }
}

Views

Views are responsible for rendering the user interface. They typically contain HTML markup along with Razor syntax (.cshtml files) to dynamically generate content.


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>@ViewBag.Message</h1>
</body>
</html>

Models

Models represent the data. They can be simple Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) or classes that interact with a database.


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

Next Steps

In the following sections, we will dive deeper into setting up your first MVC project, creating controllers and views, working with models, and understanding how routing directs requests.

.NET Docs

Web Development

ASP.NET MVC