What is the best way to get started learning ASP .NET MVC?

Question

I have limited prior ASP .NET knowledge (very basic knowledge). I have worked with Ruby on Rails and and primarily a WPF/C# developer. For a new project I am going to be working on I need to know ASP .NET MVC. What are some good resources for learning it?

Answer 1

Scott Guthrie has a great series of posts for getting started (just beware that some things he covered early on changed as the previews progressed).

There's an official tutorial list available as well.

There's also Rob Conery's MVC Storefront video series.

Stephen Walther has a good amount of MVC tips as well.

Phil Haack (the MVC PM at MS) gave a talk on MVC at MIX09 that you can watch online as well.

Answer 2

I've found Scott Hanselmann's posts on ASP.NET MVC very interesting and helpful. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=ASP.NET+MVC

Good luck! :D

Answer 3

I just finished the first phase of my first MVC project this weekend. I just used the default templates provided with MVC and started modifying it to suit my needs. Possibly not the most elegant approach, but it allowed me to start moving very quickly.

Answer 4

I like the MVC storefront videos. should be a good start for learning a lot of things along with MVC

Answer 5

Refer the resources mentioned by other SO members and along with it have a look at some of the opensource project available for ASP.NET MVC like

• KIGG DIGG Clone in ASP.NET MVC

  This is a Digg like clone. See this site live http://dotnetshoutout.com Many things to learn from this application.

• Track your car expenses with CarTrackr MVC

  CarTrackr is a sample application for the ASP.NET MVC framework using the repository
  pattern and dependency injection using the Unity application block. It was written for various demos in presentations done by Maarten Balliauw. Overall good example with
  integration with silverlight charts.

• Oxite - Blog/CMS Engine

  A blog and CMS engine built on asp.net mvc. Currently there are many controversies regarding it's design, but I feel it's still a project to refer to. There are some good ideas in it.

• Catharsis - A web application framework for ASP.NET MVC Some features of Catharsis is as below

  Catharsis provides complete Guidance, which can help you:

  1. create solution (all needed libraries)
  2. create all needed classes for every Entity object

  Catharsis has real multi tier structure

  1. Entity: Layer with business objects (person, position, contract, supplier)
  2. Common: Interface gathering layer. Every upper tier has its interfaces published
     here. And many more.... and also refer the online documentation which is pretty decent.

• A JQuery ASP.NETMVC Blog

  A step-by-step walkthrough of creating a small blog engine using ASP.NET MVC and JQuery.

Answer 6

I've been working on a series of posts about refactoring the example project template that ships with the MVC Beta to address some of the issues I've found with it. My aim is to lead folks in a better direction with the design of their code when it comes to MVC architecture (And hopefully not look like an idiot in the process).

Answer 7

A lot of the aforementiond resources cover the basics, which are important, but I found Rob Conery's MVC Storefront videos to be the most informative. The series was all about taking the ASP.NET MVC into a real-world application using best practices, which really cemented what I learnt in the "MVC 101" videos.

Also, please beware of videos and code samples which were written for one of the earlier Preview versions on ASP.NET MVC, as there are quite a lot of them floating around. Hopefully that will change once the RC comes out.