Best way to learn about .net MVC for a php programmer

Question

Ok i know theres a ton of questions around books and tutorials to learn MVC in dot net, BUT after I started reading some of that stuff i realized they are not oriented to people like me.

I have been working with php on Zend in a MVC configuration and done some ruby on rails so i do have a good idea of the pattern, but i have absolutly no idea about: IIS, Visual Studio and asp/C#... so, what is the best way(could be 1 book, a couple of tutorials, a guide, a manual, a blog-post) to get a very good idea of this technology.

At least i would except being able to know(first hand) the pros and cons of all this!

Answer 1

Screencasts help me more than anything. Seeing someone actually do something is many times more instructive than reading. Watch the screencasts on http://asp.net/mvc. Scott Hanselman's preview 3 videos are still relevant, as there haven't been many huge, sweeping changes since then. They show you how to drag data around, use LINQ, and other .NET specific things. After watching and coding along with those, check out the others.

Answer 2

If you're really starting from scratch, first step would be to download and install Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition. Those are the free versions of Microsoft's Visual Studio and database products.

Then start with a basic C# tutorial like this one to get comfortable with the features of C# that differ from PHP. You will probably cruise through it but I think it will be valuable to have this foundation.

Find a LINQ to SQL tutorial as most of the MVC tutorials use this for data access and it is probably very different from what you've seen in PHP.

From there I think you would have enough to start the MVC tutorials. Spending some time learning plain ASP.NET would certainly help you transition to ASP.NET MVC, but you would also spend a lot of time working with concepts that are absent from MVC.

Also, have MSDN at hand as a reference for the .NET framework.

Answer 3

Your at a disadvantage because you have no formal training in C# and are unfamiliar with the .Net framework. Fortunately there is always time to learn. Here is what I suggest you do. Get a C# for beginners book and start learning some C#, once you are up on that flex your html and php skills to use the MVC Framework. Another thing that might help is getting a .Net job, seriously this is the best way to learn stuff!