ASP.NET MVC: Building for Productivity and Maintainability

Learn how to build ASP.NET MVC applications for long-term productivity and maintainability and be a more productive ASP.NET developer.

Introduction

• Improve the design of your ASP.NET MVC applications
• What you should know
• Using the exercise files
• Development environment setup

1. Going Beyond the Basics

• Differentiating the ASP.NET MVC framework and design pattern
• Examining your applications to find opportunities for improvement
• Creating separate projects for application and business logic

2. Quick Wins

• Enabling view compilation to detect errors at build time
• Reducing namespace references with global imports
• Customizing routes with attribute routing
• Reusing the same view for server-side and client-side rendering
• Better error logging with ELMAH
• Managing dependencies with dependency injection

3. Simplifying Your Views

• Using extension methods to remove magic strings
• Using extension methods to strongly type common actions
• Creating custom HTML helpers to reduce and reuse markup
• Using child actions to generate complex common markup
• Challenge: Use a child action to make a smarter HTML helper
• Solution: Use a child action to make a smarter HTML helper

4. Reducing View Logic with View Models

• Creating a view model to contain view logic
• Populating a view model with data
• Updating a view to use a view model

5. Separating Controllers and Business Logic

• Reducing duplicate code with custom action filters
• Creating explicit contracts with request objects
• Moving business logic from a controller to a service
• Consuming a service from a controller
• Challenge: Creating a model validation action filter
• Solution: Creating a model validation action filter

6. Simplifying Controller Logic with the Mediator Pattern

• Understanding the Mediator pattern
• Installing and configuring MediatR
• Creating the handler
• Consuming the handler in a controller

7. Reorganizing to Feature Folders

• Understanding the feature folders approach
• Creating feature folders
• Enabling location of feature views

Conclusion

• Next steps