A hands-on journey takes you through the development process of a Web application from concept to production ASP.NET MVC is a new Web development framework created by Microsoft as an alternative to ASP.NET web forms applications. MVC is well suited to testability, and Test Driven Development (TDD) affords you a generous level of control while also making MVC very powerful and extensible. This book takes the ASP.NET MVC and combines it with a testing methodology and tools and guides you through the process of taking Web application from concept to production.
Using a complete working sample application that demonstrates all the tools needed to build an e-commerce Web application, the popular Problem ? Design ? Solution format gradually introduces you to new alternative tools, frameworks, and methodologies to get you started creating cutting-edge Web applications. ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's hot new Web development framework to use as an alternative to ASP.NET Web forms applications Use the popular Problem ? Design ? Solution recipe and encourages you to get involved with developing a Web application from concept to production Introduces new alternative tools, frameworks, and methodologies, such as nUnit and Inversion of Control containers Shows you how to use open source JavaScript libraries and work with a mocking framework
As you work with all facets of Web application development-requirements, design, testing, deployment, beta releases, refactoring, tool, and framework selection-you will have developed a live Web application by the time the book is finished.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
User review
Good Stuff,,.
This book was shorter than I expected (good thing), it doesn't have all the fluff and useless pages that we end up skipping anyway. It was a good walkthrough of using asp.net mvc and tdd from beginning to end.
I specifically liked his first couple of chapters where he sets up the coding environment with all the tools, plus I LOVE his selection of tools and the overview of patterns and best practices in the beginning of the book.
User review
Great Book!
This was a good overview of MVC and TDD. I loved the first few chapters, and his selection of tools, it was a good read! I recommend it.
User review
Not For New Developers to MVC,,,,
I purchased this book in hopes that I would get a clear picture on how to create an MVC project from start to finish. I could be over-looking one small detail but I cannot even get past the first test for a testing a title. Anyway, I'm going to purchase another book in hopes it will help me get through this book since I already wasted $40. Very disappointed, I would not recommend this to someone who would like to learn MVC. Even creating something as trivial as a controller, I would assume he would say add a controller and not a class and give reasons as to why and what the differences are. I created the first test and I do not know how to run the tests, it just builds and brings up the registration screen without hitting the tests and the book does not explain how to implement that. You say delete all the automatically created files the solution create but what files do I delete without messing up the solution? All these problems and I'm only into the 3rd page of the 3rd chapter. Again, if you are new to MVC you will not be able to build this project following the steps in the book.
User review
Slightly disappointed
I had high hopes for this book when I picked it up. Unfortunately, the content did not deliver. While I agree that it is nice to see the author made use of some good good design patterns and principles, It just wasn't enough. First of all, if your not utilizing Test Driven Development in any MVC project, you probably should really consider gaining some insight into this methodology. MVC is perfect for TDD. Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection patterns are a no brainer also. All MVC books out there use this pattern so there was nothing new here.
The problem I have with this book is that it seemed rushed and there were numerous errors in the code. I'm wondering if this book was started with the beta version of MVC and the author attempted to refactor after the final release. In the begining of the book, the author stated he was going to use the YUI editor for the rich text component of the site. However, he actually chose to go with jWYSIWYG, a extremely light, no frills editor that is just not suited for most robust applications.
The test framework he chose was MbUnit. Why? He explains that Visual Studio has a built-in test framework (MSTest) but chose not to use it because ` I didn't want to assume that you have a few thousand dollars to spare on a copy of Visual Studio`. He also admitted that most of the test frameworks have a very fast dev lifecycle and that the version in the book may be slightly outdated from the one that you are likely to download. IMHO, that is bad. Most people reading this book are senior level developers making a living with Visual Studio and the tools it offers. It's very likely that they already have a copy of VS Pro or Team or they have access to it at work or through MSDN. Also, most readers will scan the beginning of the book to see what tools the author is using. MSTest is a good framework that does not have builds released every 2-5 days. I would even have preferred nUnit over mbUnit.
His choice of IoC container is subjective. He chose Ninject. Personally, I think Castle or the MS Enterprise library would have been a better choice. Ninject relies on `contextual binding` rather than XML config files. That means you cannot alter your apps configuration after it has been compiled. Personally, I don't like that, but it's a preference.
That said, I do think Moq and jQuery were excellent choices. I really would have liked to see this project built with more standard tools and the code examples checked more thoroughly. As it is, it's an OK book on ASP.NET MVC but there are better ones out there.
User review
Great Practical Exercise in TDD with ASP.NET MVC
Before I get into the details of the book, it is important to know that the audience of this book is not for novice programmers or experience non ASP.NET developers. To really get value from this book, you should have some decent exposure to ASP.NET under your belt.
With that said, this book is a very good overview of both ASP.NET MVC and Test Driven Development (TDD). It takes the reader through the process of developing a whole application using the Test First methodology. I found this interesting in that some decisions Emad made initially were later refactored in the book as the application evolved and changed, which is a great way to see the value of TDD and its approach.
This book covers quite a few advanced programming concepts that may be new to you such as various Design Patterns (Strategy, Null Objects, Repository, etc,,.), Design Principles (Open-Closed Principle, YAGNI, DRY, Inversion of Control, Single Responsibility, Convention Over Configuration, etc,,.). Emad does a good job about explaining these concepts as he approaches them in the application.
About the same time that I was reading this book, I was in the process of evaluating various tools and frameworks to use for a new ASP.NET MVC v2 project I am working on. I found it interesting that Emad ended up choosing most of the same tools that I had at the time such as: MbUnit, Ninject, Moq, and jQuery. If you are familiar with tools other than the ones he chose at the time of writing this book, you should be able to easily substitute your favorite tool instead. Most of the competitors for these tools have basically the same features.
Since this is a new book, I did run across numerous typos, references to code that wasn't displayed, refactored code that wasn't indicated in the text, and several other minor issues, but all in all I knew what Emad was getting at and it wasn't hard to follow his train of thought. I plan to submit these inconsistencies to the Errata to hopefully clean up these small issues for future printings of this book.
I highly recommend downloading the source code from this book (which you can do for free). It is one of the few projects that I've seen that has a plethora of Unit Tests to look at and get an idea of how to test your ASP.NET MVC project. I've seen numerous other ASP.NET MVC projects that only have a minimal number of Unit Tests and don't really give you a good idea of how you could get good Code Coverage.
If you are interested in getting a jumpstart into both ASP.NET MVC and Test Driven Development, then I think this is a great book for you to get. However, if you aren't so sure about TDD and you just want to get up to speed on ASP.NET MVC, then I might recommend you get one of the other beginning ASP.NET MVC books.
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