Suggestions for Structure of an ASP.NET MVC Application

Question

I am a Java Developer making the transition to the C# world. I've gotten a pretty good handle on ASP.NET MVC (and can compare/contrast it to the concepts I learned for Struts).

However, I'm looking for advice on how to structure my project. Currently, I have two solutions in the project: the MVC Web Application and a ClassLibrary section.

The application uses a tiered architecture: Controllers/Services/DAOs. To make things work "right", I have the Controller and Model classes in the MVC solution, and Services, DAO, and Security in the ClassLibrary solution. Unfortunately, this is causing all sorts of minor issues (example: extending the UserAccount object from the Entity Framework on the ClassLibrary side is ambiguous when I try to extend it on the MVC side for form validation).

The only solution I can come up with is to put EVERYTHING into the MVC project, and organizen what is currently in the ClassLibrary under the App_Code folder. It would solve some issues, but just seems "wrong" to me; my Java projects separated code into a src directory and views (jsp's) into ta webapp directory.

What do some of the more experienced .NET developers think?

Answer 1

What do you mean by making things work "right"? I find that most issues can be fixed by simply including the namespace in the web.config's namespace import section. When you do that, your models from the other assembly are automatically resolved and they show up in the MVC dialogs, and in intellisense when coding views.

Answer 2

Generally in .NET solutions, the best bet is to separate code into different projects only if that code may be useful to other applications, or when the code itself represents a complete solution to some problem domain. A class library that is only referenced by one application project is a waste.

Also, keep in mind that .NET does not allow circular references between objects in two different assemblies (which translates one-to-one with projects usually).

In your example I would suggest that you consider one class library for the model, services, and security... depending on what you mean when you say "services" though.

In most cases, data access is somewhat coupled to the concept of the MVC model, so you might consider putting the data access in there too... but if you have a very cleanly separated data access layer it might fit into it's own class library.

The controllers and views generally should go into the web project directly.

In general, my advice is to split stuff into separate projects ONLY when you have an actual "need" to do so. But assemblies and projects are NOT a good way to represent layers or tiers in most applications. Those are logical concepts that don't always map well to a physical project structure.

If you design your actual classes well and avoid tight coupling, you can usually move code into class libraries later if a real compelling need does arise.