Chapter 1. Getting started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
This chapter covers
- Running the starter project
- Progressing through Hello World examples
- Routing basics
- Unit testing basics
Depending on how long you’ve been building web applications on the Microsoft platform, you’ll relate to some or all of the following pain. In the 1990s, developers built interactive websites using executable programs that ran on a server. These programs (Common Gateway Interface [CGI] was a common technology at the time) accepted a web request and were responsible for creating an HTML response. Templating was ad hoc, and the programs were difficult to write, debug, and test. In the late 1990s, Microsoft, after a brief stint with HTX templates and IDC connectors, introduced Active Server Pages, or ASP. ASP brought templating to web applications. The server page was an HTML document with dynamic script mixed in. Although this was a big step forward from the alternatives, the world soon saw massive server pages with code indecipherable from the markup.
In early 2002, along came ASP.NET and the Web Forms Framework. Web Forms were a complete shift for ASP developers, partly because they moved most program logic into a class file (called a code-behind) and replaced the HTML markup with dynamic server controls written in an XML syntax. Although performance increased, and the debugging experience improved, new problems arose.