Introduction To ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC is a framework for building scalable, standards-based web applications using well-established design patterns and the power of ASP.NET and the .NET Framework.
ASP.NET Core is built on .NET Core , which is a cross-platform version of the .NET Framework without the Windows-specific application programming interfaces (APIs). Windows is still a dominant operating system but web applications are increasingly hosted in small and simple containers in cloud platforms, and by embracing a cross-platform approach, Microsoft has extended the reach of .NET, made it possible to deploy ASP.NET Core applications to a broader set of hosting environments, and, as a bonus, made it possible for developers to create ASP.NET Core web applications on Linux and OS X/macOS.
ASP.NET Core is a completely new framework. It is simpler, it is easier to work with, and it is free of the legacy that comes from Web Forms. And, since it is based on .NET Core, it supports the development of web applications on a range of platforms and containers. ASP.NET Core MVC provides the functionality of the original ASP.NET MVC Framework built on the new ASP.NET Core platform. It includes the functionality that was previously provided by Web API, it includes a more natural way of generating complex content, and it makes key development tasks, such as unit testing, simpler and more predictable.
Key Benefits of ASP.NET Core MVC:
ASP.NET Core MVC follows a pattern called model-view-controller (MVC), which guides the shape of an ASP. NET web application and the interactions between the components it contains. It is important to distinguish between the MVC architectural pattern and the ASP.NET Core MVC implementation.
• User interaction with an application that adheres to the MVC pattern follows a natural cycle: the user takes an action, and in response the application changes its data model and delivers an updated view to the user. And then the cycle repeats. This is a convenient fit for web applications delivered as a series of HTTP requests and responses.
• Web applications necessitate combining several technologies (databases, HTML, and executable code, for example), usually split into a set of tiers or layers. The patterns that arise from these combinations map naturally onto the concepts in the MVC pattern.
ASP.NET Core MVC implements the MVC pattern and, in doing so, provides a greatly improved separation of concerns when compared to Web Forms. In fact, ASP.NET Core MVC implements a variant of the MVC pattern that is especially suitable for web applications.
Extensibility:
ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET Core MVC are built as a series of independent components that have welldefined characteristics, satisfy a .NET interface or that are built on an abstract base class. You can easily replace key components with ones of your own implementation. In general, the ASP.NET Core MVC gives you these three options for each component:
• Use the default implementation of the component as it stands (which should be enough for most applications).
• Derive a subclass of the default implementation to tweak its behavior.
• Replace the component entirely with a new implementation of the interface or abstract base class.
Tight Control over HTML and HTTP:
ASP.NET Core MVC produces clean, standards-compliant markup. Its built-in tag helpers produce standards-compliant output, but there is a more significant philosophical change compared with Web Forms. Instead of generating out swathes of HTML over which you have little control, ASP.NET Core MVC encourages you to craft simple, elegant markup styled with CSS.
Of course, if you do want to throw in some ready-made widgets for complex UI elements such as date pickers or cascading menus, the “no special requirements” approach taken by ASP.NET Core MVC makes it easy to use best-of-breed client-side libraries such as jQuery, Angular, or the Bootstrap CSS library. ASP.NET
Core MVC meshes so well with these libraries that Microsoft includes support for them as built-in parts of the standard Visual Studio project template for web applications. ASP.NET Core MVC works in tune with HTTP. You have control over the requests passing between the browser and server, so you can fine-tune your user experience as much as you like. Ajax is made easy, and creating web services to receive browser HTTP requests is a simple process.
Testability:
The ASP.NET Core MVC architecture gives you a great start in making your application maintainable and testable because you naturally separate different application concerns into independent pieces. In addition, each piece of the ASP.NET Core platform and the ASP.NET Core MVC framework can be isolated and replaced for unit testing, which can be performed using any popular open source testing framework.
Powerful Routing System:
The style of uniform resource locators (URLs) has evolved as web application technology has improved.
URLs like this one:
/App_v2/User/Page.aspx?action=show%20prop&prop_id=82742
are increasingly rare, replaced with a simpler, cleaner format like this:
/to-rent/chicago/2303-silver-street
There are some good reasons for caring about the structure of URLs. First, search engines give weight to keywords found in a URL. A search for “rent in Chicago” is much more likely to turn up the simpler URL. Second, many web users are now savvy enough to understand a URL and appreciate the option of navigating by typing it into their browser’s address bar. Third, when someone understands the structure of a URL, they are more likely to link to it, share it with a friend, or even read it aloud over the phone. Fourth, it doesn’t expose the technical details, folder, and file name structure of your application to the public Internet, so you are free to change the underlying implementation without breaking all your incoming links. Clean URLs were hard to implement in earlier frameworks, but ASP.NET Core MVC uses a feature known as URL routing to provide clean URLs by default. This gives you control over your URL schema and its relationship to your application, offering you the freedom to create a pattern of URLs that is meaningful and useful to your users, without the need to conform to a predefined pattern. And, of course, this means you can easily define a modern REST-style URL schema if you want.
Modern API:
Microsoft’s .NET platform has evolved with each major release, supporting — and even defining — the state-of-theart aspects of modern programming. ASP.NET Core MVC is built for .NET Core, so its API can take full advantage of language and runtime innovations familiar to C# programmers, including the await keyword, extension methods, lambda expressions, anonymous and dynamic types, and Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Many of the ASP.NET Core MVC API methods and coding patterns follow a cleaner, more expressive composition than was possible with earlier platforms.
Previous versions of ASP.NET were specific to Windows, requiring a Windows desktop to write web applications and a Windows server to deploy and run them. Microsoft made ASP.NET Core cross-platform, both for development and for deployment. .NET Core is available for different platforms — including Linux and OS X/macOS — and is likely to be ported to others. Most ASP.NET Core MVC development is likely to be done using Visual Studio for the immediate future, but Microsoft has also created a cross-platform development tool called Visual Studio Code, which means that ASP.NET Core MVC development is no longer restricted to Windows. ASP.NET Core MVC Is Open Source Unlike previous Microsoft web development platforms, you are free to download the source code for ASP. NET Core and ASP.NET Core MVC and even modify and compile your own version of it. This is invaluable when your debugging trail leads into a system component and you want to step into its code. It is also useful if you are building an advanced component and want to see what development possibilities exist or how the built-in components actually work.
