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What is ASP.NET MVC?

4:51 with James Churchill

What is ASP.NET MVC? To answer this question, we'll start by taking a look at how a website works.

Additional Learning

If you’re unfamiliar with HTTP, be sure to check out the Treehouse HTTP Basics course.

For more information about design patterns, see Craig Dennis’ excellent Introduction to Design Patterns workshop.

Microsoft’s official ASP.NET website is a great resource. Here are the URLs to the three flavors of ASP.NET.

  • 0:00

    What is ASP.NET MVC?

  • 0:02

    To answer this question, let's start by taking a look at how a website works.

  • 0:08

    Every website or web application has two key participants, client and the server.

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    When browsing a website or using a web application,

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    you're using a web browser to communicate with the server.

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    Your browser might be a desktop or mobile version,

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    Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge.

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    In all of those cases the browser is the client.

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    When you perform an action in the browser by clicking on a link or

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    submitting a form the browser formats and sends a request to the server.

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    The server receives the request and

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    prepares a response to return to the client.

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    The format of the request and response follows a specific set of rules

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    known as HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

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    When developing websites, there are two places that we can run code,

  • 1:03

    the client and the server.

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    On the client we typically use HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

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    This is often referred to as client-side or front end development.

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    On the server, it's not a straightforward.

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    We have a lot of options for doing server-side or back end development.

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    We can use Java, Python, PHP or

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    even JavaScript using Node.js, just to name some.

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    But we're looking to use C#.

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    So we'll use ASP.NET, a web framework that's part of .NET.

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    ASP.NET comes in several flavors including web forms, web pages or MVC.

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    Of these three options MVC is the most popular.

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    That's lucky for us, since this happens to be a course about ASP.NET MVC.

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    The MVC, and ASP.NET MVC, refers to the popular MVC design pattern.

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    So what is the MVC design pattern?

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    You might even be wondering, what is a design pattern?

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    Over the years, developers noticed a set of problems that kept coming up time and

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    time again.

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    Some of these problems were so common, it became obvious

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    that it would be helpful to describe and share solutions in very general terms,

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    without regard to any specific technology or programming language.

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    That way developers everywhere could learn and benefit from their efforts.

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    These solutions, written as descriptions or

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    templates, are referred to as design patterns.

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    So what is MVC?

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    MVC is a design pattern.

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    In fact MVC is a very common design pattern.

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    It's used in a wide variety of server side frameworks including Ruby on Rails and

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    Java Spring Framework.

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    It's even used in client-side JavaScript frameworks like Angular.js.

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    Let's take a closer look.

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    MVC is an acronym that stands for Model View Controller.

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    The model represents the data in your website.

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    The view is the visual part.

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    And the controller is the coordinator.

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    When users browse to a specific page in our website,

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    the controller is responsible for coordinating what specific actions need to

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    be performed In order to return a response for that user request.

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    Don't worry if you don't fully understand how the MVC design pattern works.

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    At this point it's good enough to know that there is something called a mode,

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    a view, and a controller.

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    As we build a comic book gallery website we'll continue to explore the MVC

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    design pattern.

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    All right, we've covered a lot of ground.

  • 3:51

    Let's go back to our original question, what is ASP.NET MVC?

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    ASP.NET MVC is a server-side web framework that utilizes the MVC design pattern.

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    It's used to process HTTP requests and prepare responses

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    containing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for rendering in a browser.

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    Although this can seem overly complicated

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    especially when you're new to web development.

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    It's okay to feel that way.

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    As developers, it's important and helpful to know the big picture, but

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    it's not something that we think about all the time.

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    As we build our website, we'll be focusing on small individual parts of the process.

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    That will make it easier for us to learn and be productive.

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    We covered a lot of information in this video.

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    Let's do a short quiz in order to reinforce the main points.

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    After that, we will create a GitHub repo for our project.

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    See you then.

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