Good Afternoon,
I'm rebuilding an event ticketing site originally developed using ASP.NET 3.5 WebForms and am considering using ASP.NET MVC2 for the rebuilt solution. I like the idea of friendly URLs as the current site has very long query string URLs for each specified event. MVC2 also appeals from a separation of concerns point of view as well. The biggest unknown for me is will MVC2 handle calls to 3 separate web services (SOAP and REST) to get ticket availability? That is, does the controller functionality permit use of such web services? Finally, MVC3 is due to RTM in January. Am I better off waiting for MVC3, or can I start the project in MVC2 and port it later?
Thanks for all your advice and insight.
MVC can handle any HTTP request as ASP.NET forms does. Indeed you should consider to use WCF for handling SOAP queries. And yes, sure you can easely create REST API with MVC.
It is better to start now, with ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2. It is very stable and nice. This will minimize migration work. Welcome to MVC happy world!
The controller will let you run pretty much any code you want.
I just started using MVC in a big project and it's turning out well. We went with MVC 3 and it's been a little tricky living on the edge, but it seems to have a lot of nice improvements. I'm extremely happy to be using MVC instead of Web Forms. To me, it seems to flow smoothly instead of fighting with the way the web works.
Related
Why do people call RIA services a black magic? What kind of black magic do they refer to ? Also, i have seen most people do not use RIA even though they are in Silverlight world. Why is it so? Even on stackoverflow, the % of people asking as well as answering to RIA services question is very very low. Why is it so?
WCF RIA Services provides the following benefits:
Makes a WCF RIA service that supports IQueryable and IEnumerable; WCF RIA Services creates client-side proxy which allows you to send only expression trees over the wire from the client in order to get back just the data you need. For example: you can call a method in your ria service called GetProducts() but also add a LINQ lambda such as GetProducts().Where( d => d.Quantity > 50 ) and only the expression is sent over the wire to the server. The server does the filtering and returns just the matches as strongly typed objects.
Dynamic generation of OData, REST/JSON, and SOAP endpoints with little more than a single line per endpoint in your web.Config.
Ability to automatically flow business rules created at the middle tier into the client tier
Allows you to efficiently flow validations from the middle tier to the user
Allows property, parameter, method, object, collection, and changeset level business rules through simple data annotation validator decoration
There are some deficiencies:
Still does not support WS-* (will in 5) for RPC
OData provider is not queryable
Well, I have not yet heard of people referring to WCF RIA Services as black magic.
I believe there is a small number of people using it (compared to the number of people writing stuff in Silverlight), because it is younger. People may have been developing their Silverlight applications for some time now (version 3.0 came out in July 2009) using classic WCF Services.
WCR RIA Services is still new (version 1.0 came out in May 2010, the final SP1 in December 2010) and we all know the rule, "Never change a running system", so if someone already has a working WCF webservice, why change it? In my case, we experimented with Silverlight and WCF some time ago and decided to wait. When RIA Services came out we thought that was great and started working on a Silverlight version of our main application. It is much easier using RIA Services in a new project than chaning your webservice access in an existing one.
In addition to that it should be noted that Silverlight is not limited to business applications with database access using a webservice. Therefore there may be quite a few Silverlight developers who do not need any kind of webservice.
Another reason might be the fact that for web applications requiring a database other technologies like ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, even PHP or JSP (and possibly others I may not even have heard of) have existed for quite a while. And although business applications ought to look nice, too, it usually is not the top requirement to have all kinds of fancy graphics and animations, etc.
Finally, why are so few questions regarding RIA Services asked on SO? Well, they do have their own forum which seems to be quite active. (I use it as a resource when looking for answers but don't post there.)
Regarding the "black magic" part of your question, I believe it is the ongoing shift to convention over configuration. Compared to vanilla WCF, you end up writing very little code to build the client-server relationship. Also, the WCF RIA tooling does a substantial amount of code generation to achieve this.
More on convention over configuration on specifically with WCF RIA and generally at Wikipedia.
This might be the most trivial question asked, but I raise it again. Am planning to get started with asp.net MVC on a personal project and here am struck if it supports webparts or any other alternative to it is present. I intend to have a start page similar to igoogle or pageflakes, but my initial research pointed out that as there's no ViewState nor Postback concepts in ASP.NET MVC implementing web parts is not possible.
If that is the case, are there any resources which helps in building a start page as the one i wish to using MVC.
PS: Links I found in the initial research
Quick tips on asp.net MVC -
webparts framework
Building widgets using jquery in
asp.net MVC
You should use AJAX to create widgets that can interact with the server without reloading the page.
This way, the widgets will not affect each-other.
jQuery will be useful here.
Alternatively, you could put each widget in its own <iframe>.
I'm looking for some free ASP.NET MVC design templates for an internally facing web app. We don't have a graphic designer and I'm not good at that side of things.
Can anybody suggest some good links? All I've found so far is http://mvccontribgallery.codeplex.com/, but there's nothing there that suits.
Thanks!
You can make any html template compatible with ASP.NET MVC. Don't limit yourself.
I want to start migrating a WebForms App to MVC. The process will be gradual, so both systems must co-exist.
The question is: Should I have two MasterPages, one for the WebForms pages and other for the MVC views? Is there a way to have only one?
In ASP.NET MVC the master page should derive from System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage while in classic WebForms from System.Web.UI.MasterPage. If in MVC you use the latter you won't have access to any helpers. Although you could use ViewMasterPage in classic webforms because it derives from MasterPage (once again you won't have access to helpers in the web forms application but who cares).
So to answer your question, yes, you could have a common master page assuming it derives from ViewMasterPage.
This being said you probably won't be able to make this work as in an MVC master page you would use HTML helpers to render partial views like Html.RenderPartial which doesn't make much sense in a classic WebForms application and vice versa in a classic WebForms application you would probably be using some server side controls like <asp:xxx runat="server" /> or have a single form tag (again with runat="server") polluted with ViewState, etc... which hardly makes any sense in MVC. So my recommendation would be not to do like this.
I need to re-write a businesss InfoPath / SharePoint application that has a fair bit of logic associated the operations a user performs - such as enable / disable controls; show / hide controls (complex tab controls); retrieve different data nad display differenty - as determined by user activity.
In trying to decide whether to use ASP.Net Web forms or ASP.Net MVC. As such I have been hunting around for a good realworld ASP.Net MVC sample business application (with Source code).
Does anyone know of anything that can demonstrate to me how to achieve the 'richness' of user interactions and responses in ASP.Net MVC that one can achieve using Web Forms?
I am know the Dinner Nerd application; and have checked out the offerings on CodePlex. So far most of the sample applications I have found do not have much of the complexity we have become used to dealing with in Web forms; and that I need to try and achieve. I posiibly have have to rethink the presentation & flow of the application in response to user actions in an MVC application (as compared to how one migh structure the flow in InfoPath / Winforms and Web forms). This might shift me more to what the existing sample applications might be indicating to me -'change the focus of the Views to be of presentational bias'. As such one would end up with many views each only permitting a reduced set of use interactions.
Thanks for any comments in advance.
Grant
There is exactly the same question asked here (ok, it is not about business apps) - Real World ASP.NET MVC Applications with Source Code?
just keep in mind that asp.net-mvc makes it really easy to write unit tests, which is the most important thing when coding applications.
If you have complex interaction scenarios you might be interested in performance too, asp-net.mvc performance is a way better...
Asp.net-mvc 2 (I haven't looked at 3 yet) makes the validation really easy and you can choose at which level you want it.