Part 1. High-speed fundamentals

Part 1 is for those folks who haven’t done much with ASP.NET MVC and need to see every concept individually before using them all together. Whether or not you have followed some of the tutorials available at http://www.asp.net/mvc, you will find the chapters in part 1 very easy to follow. But don’t expect part 1 to be only for absolute beginners. We move very quickly from creating your very first ASP.NET MVC project all the way through exploring all the key concepts in depth.

Before you begin chapter 1, you will want to install ASP.NET MVC 2 if you are using Visual Studio 2008. If you are using Visual Studio 2010, you already have ASP.NET MVC 2 installed.

In chapter 1, we walk through a beginner ramp-up, covering the basics of the MVC pattern and ASP.NET MVC implementation. Chapter 2 takes you through implementing a presentation model. Next, chapter 3 covers the fundamentals of MVC views, including some of the templating features new in ASP.NET MVC 2. Chapter 4 introduces the basics of controllers: handling requests, form posts, and passing information to the view. Chapter 5 explains how to include several types of third-party components, including MvcContrib and a file upload control. Chapter 6 describes how to host ASP.NET MVC applications, looking at various server requirements, setting up IIS, and configuring different environments. Finally, chapter 7 rounds out part 1 by leveraging existing ASP.NET features, such as caching, cookies, sessions, and others.

Once you understand the fundamentals of ASP.NET MVC, you can move on with confidence to part 2, which will layer on more combinatory concepts.