1. ASP.Net MVC Extensibility, scalability and testability Andrew Locatelli Woodcock

2.  Andrew Woodcock  15 years development experience, mostly Microsoft technologies specializing in server-side development with C#, ASP.Net / ASP.Net MVC and SQL Server  Writing code with C# since 2004  For last 2 years have worked as a Lead Developer for CitiBank in Dublin as a member of Citi’s UI Framework’s team, developing a common ASP.Net MVC and C# based UI framework to underpin Citi’s future banking websites around the globe About Me

3.  Brief intro to ASP.Net MVC, what it is and what it isn’t  The Model View Controller design pattern  Why use ASP.Net MVC: extensibility, scalability and testability  ASP.Net MVC in action: the Fly by Night Courier website, unit testing and custom view engines About the presentation

4.  Developed as an open-source compliment to ASP.Net WebForms  Gaining in popularity and now in version 3  Very logical and easy to use – most of the time!  In comparison to WebForms, offers:  Full control over HTML and URLs  Better scalability: no more View State!  Better separation of concerns  Extensibility  Testability Brief intro to ASP.Net MVC

5.  Event-driven  Stateful  Tightly-coupled: data, business logic and presentation are separated – you can even develop your own View Engine to drive presentation  WinForms for the Web! It does not have a complex event-driven page-lifecycle, it does not mix presentation and business logic in a form ASP.Net MVC is NOT

6.  The Model-View-Controller design pattern has been around since the late 1970s  Clear separation of concerns  Model is data  View is presentation of data  Controller manages Model and View to produce output but decouples data from its presentation Model View Controller

7.  Very easy to develop – most of the time!  Logical and consistent – again, most of the time!  Stateless: no more page life-cycle  Highly testable: more so than ASP.Net WebForms although some features are still difficult to mock: HttpRequest object for one (as opposed to HttpRequestBase)  Scalable: single round-trip per view, no ViewState  Highly extensible: pretty much everything can be customized Why MVC?

8.  Renders pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript  Designed to REST principles  Excellent AJAX support – supports JSON natively  Like Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net MVC “favours convention over configuration”:  Controller names end in …Controller  Controllers are placed in the Controllers folder, Models in the Models folder and Views in the Views folder  Controller ActionMethod names usually match the name of the View they generate: Details method will return the Details view, etc.  Views reside in known locations: Views / {controller} / {action} although this can be changed in Routes More MVC goodness

9.  MVC supports multiple View Engines even in the same project: ASP.Net, Razor, Spark, Nhaml, etc.  Views can use any syntax that their View Engine understands  Views can be strongly-typed to a Model, allowing much of the view to be templated and automatically created  Different Views can use different View Engines  View Engines can support new View syntax or use existing syntax in new ways  You can develop your own custom View Engine … as we shall see … There’s still more …

10.  ASP.Net MVC is more readily unit testable than ASP.Net WebForms  Controllers, Views and Models can all be unit tested reasonably easily  Separation of concerns aids unit testing – Models are POCO for example  MVCContrib TestHelper provides helper methods to setup Controllers, etc. ready for testing – we’ll see this in action later  Models are POCO – very easy to test  MVC provides wrapper classes to better support mocking intrinsic objects: HttpContextWrapper, HttpRequestWrapper, etc.  Still not perfect though due mainly to hang-overs from ASP.Net WebForms – very hard to mock the HttpRequest static class for example. Testing, testing

11.  Let’s get our hands dirty!  Deep dive into MVC via the Fly by Night Couriers website  Hands-on MVC  Some testing  And some custom View Engine goodness … Fly by Night Couriers

12.  ASP.Net MVC 3: http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3  Moq mocking framework: http://code.google.com/p/moq/ - no more record-replay!http://code.google.com/p/moq/  MVCContrib TestHelper: http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/releases/59313/download/ 198550 - easy initialization of Controllers and their intrinsic objects, etc. http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/releases/59313/download/ 198550  Log4Net: http://logging.apache.org/log4net/http://logging.apache.org/log4net/  activePDF WebGrabber WBE: http://www.activepdf.comhttp://www.activepdf.com Software used

13.  This presentation and the code samples will be summarized on my blog over the next few weeks:  http://www.andrewlocatelliwoodcock.com http://www.andrewlocatelliwoodcock.com Second chance