Hi,
I've begun reading an excellent book on ASP.NET MVC 2 by Manning Press. In the early part of the book, the authors imply understanding ASP.NET 3.5/4.0 is good for building ASP.NET MVC 2 concepts on top. I am an intermediate developer - should I cover ASP.NET first or can I get by ?
Thanks,
Scott
Go for it as you are now. Yes, it would help to have a background in ASP.NET WebForms, but you'll do fine just keeping in mind that there is this other 'thing' out there which is going to be referenced a lot as you read about ASP.NET MVC.
No doubt, You can directly go for MVC but if you have knowledge of general asp.net then it will be very help full to you in MVC. because availability of help and tuts for general asp.net application is much higher than MVC.
The biggest advantage would be knowing C# or VB.NET. ASP.Net and MVC are yet very different in how to use it. but also have similarities. if you want to study MVC, you don't need to learn asp.net at first, because it'll only confuse you. and it is not very nescesary.
The things you'll learn or should learn to make a good/great MVC application are C#, Linq and jQuery.
ofcourse this is just my opinion.
Knowing HTML, JavaScript, CSS and obviously C# or VB is all you need to be a kickass MVC developer. It also helps to know some stuff about how a webserver works internally when you want to do some more advanced stuff.
But ASP.NET Webforms on it's own? No you don't need that knowledge AT ALL to start developing in MVC.
You'll pick plenty of some bad habits if you learn asp.net by itself. Some devs have trouble unlearning those when moving to asp.net MVC.
imho learning it in the context of asp.net MVC should reduce those. Can't really tell for sure, since I worked with asp.net since 1.0, so I knew it pretty well before moving to asp.net MVC.
@eglasius: well i dont agree on the long run. if you want to be a decent developer you need to know the underling technologies. and asp.net is not rocket science ;-) – Yves M
I think that's actually an argument for not learning asp.net by itself. I've seen devs learn asp.net and not knowing much of the underlying technologies, and imho asp.net MVC makes a much better job at encouraging you to know about http, html, css, ajax, etc.
Dig into the pieces of asp.net that you work with in asp.net / Session, Cache, anything that you end up using. Not much point in learning about aspx syntax and controls, if you will go with a different View Engine. Also there are some parts of the control lifecycle that's just noise when you are just working with aspx/ascx in asp.net MVC.
Gathering prior knowledge for LINQ, WCF and ADO.NET data services, JSON, Entity Framework, etc. (part of .NET 3.5/4.0 framework) can help you tremendously when you advance towards the ASP.NET MVC development path. At least that is my opinion. – Dick Lampard
Definitely. You are more likely to learn JSON by going into asp.net MVC than by going web forms. When learning asp.net you risk further obscuring data access in the learning experience by using the Data Source controls (we didn't had those in asp.net 1.0 :)). As for the rest, those are more neutral pieces of the framework, you could be developing desktop applications and be learning those. I agree with the thinking that knowing those are skills that transfer very well, but you don't need to go to asp.net to learn those / doing so in the context of asp.net MVC is perfectly ok.
Do you need to know ASP.NET WebForms? No, because you'll be using MVC for your presentation. Would it be useful to know all the other bits that are in ASP.NET? Absolutely.
You should think of ASP.NET as a whole platform - WebForms and MVC are only two pieces, there's lots of other pieces of functionality built into the platform that are useful regardless of your presentation technology - membership, caching etc. Those presentation-agnostic pices are what you should concentrate on.