Steve Sanderson’s blog

This week Apress is sending the second edition of my ASP.NET MVC book to the printers. Hopefully this means you can get your hands on physical copies by the end of this month.

The first edition went deep into the details of the MVC Framework, providing both tutorials and reference material. Judging by sales and review scores, it was a success. The second edition:

• … is thoroughly updated for ASP.NET MVC 2. It explains all the new features, including templating, metadata, validation, asynchronous controllers, areas, HTTP method overloading, strongly-typed input helpers, default parameters, etc., and many are demonstrated in the various tutorials.
• … is updated to account for .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Even though .NET 4/C# 4 is the preferred technology throughout the book, all the documentation and code accounts for readers using .NET 3.5 as well.
• … is updated to reflect more recent patterns and best practices. For example, discussions of automated testing apply ideas from Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) where relevant, and tutorials and descriptions now consistently distinguish between view models and domain models.
• … is updated in light of reader feedback from the first edition. Certain explanations and terminology are overhauled, and the tutorials make use of more effective third-party libraries (e.g., Ninject for Dependency Injection).

This blog post is partly intended to build awareness of the new book, and is partly intended to deal with some of the questions I regularly get by email. So, here are some questions that people frequently ask:

Is this a new book, or an update?

It’s an update of the first edition. The following diagram should clarify what proportions of the book are new, dramatically changed, or just refreshed:

Where and exactly when can I get it?

I don’t know the exact date when it will ship; this depends on physical production and distribution schedules that are beyond my knowledge.

• For printed copies, your best bet is to pre-order with Amazon. Hopefully these will ship around the end of June, but I can’t guarantee it.
• For the eBook version, keep checking the Apress web site.

There’ll probably be a Kindle version in due course, too.

If I already have the first edition, should I buy the second edition?

If you use ASP.NET MVC regularly - especially if plan to use the new MVC 2 features but haven’t yet learned about them in depth - you may well get a lot out of reading the new edition and seeing what’s the same and what’s new. You may also have colleagues who need a deeper knowledge of the whole MVC Framework, including both v1 and v2 features.

However if you don’t use ASP.NET MVC much and don’t intend to migrate your development to v2, perhaps there isn’t such a strong case for buying an update of a book you already own.

Some readers have asked if they can get a sort of “upgrade” edition which contains only the new material. That wouldn’t really make sense for this book, as the new concepts and practices are applied throughout. I don’t present “old” material followed by “new” material – the whole manuscript is updated as a single coherent guide to ASP.NET MVC 2 from the beginning as I believe this gives the clearest understanding.

What new and updated in the second edition?

There are far too many updates and enhancements in the new edition to describe them all. Here’s a brief outline of the table of contents and roughly how each chapter has changed.

Chapter 1: What’s the Big Idea?

Updated to account for ASP.NET 4, including improvements to WebForms and how this impacts the comparison between the two frameworks. Gives an overview of what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2. Changed the discussion general software development practices to account for more recent trends.

Chapter 2: Your First ASP.NET MVC Application

Tutorial now accounts for your choice of Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. Uses new ASP.NET MVC 2 features, including empty project template, automatic HTML encoding, and Data Annotations validation. Streamlined the flow of the tutorial to improve readability.

Chapter 3: Prerequisites

Describes newer architectural patterns including MVVM. Discussion of automated testing expanded to cover integration testing as well as unit testing, and demonstrates Cucumber-style BDD testing and explains the tradeoffs between this and traditional unit TDD. Various updates to terminology and explanations.

Chapter 4, 5, 6: SportsStore tutorial

Now accounts for your choice of Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. Improved the code: better project structure, uses Ninject instead of Castle Windsor for DI, has better unit test naming (BDD-style) with a clearer description of the limitations of such testing. Applies the viewmodel pattern and related terminology more consistently.

Adapted the tutorial to benefit from MVC 2 features including optional parameters, metadata, scaffolding, client-side validation, automatic (de)serialization, etc. Some parts of the tutorial now go in a different order to make it easier to follow.

Chapter 7: Overview of ASP.NET MVC Projects

Updated to account for ASP.NET MVC 2’s two project template options (empty and non-empty), and for changes in the core ASP.NET 4 platform regarding configuration and deployment.

Chapter 8: URLs and Routing

Now covers areas – reasons for using them, setting them up, their impact on routing, how to avoid common problems, how to unit test their routing configuration. Explains how .NET 4 changes where the routing code lives and how ASP.NET MVC 2 deals with controller namespaces. Many smaller changes.

Chapter 9: Controllers

The 1st edition’s “Controllers” chapter is now split in two – this first chapter now covers introductory topics – receiving input data with parameter binding etc, producing output with action results etc., unit testing.

Has many changes to account for ASP.NET MVC 2, such as its enhancements to TempData. Also describes .NET 4 features – using optional parameters (and how these differ from ASP.NET MVC 2’s parameter defaults), using “dynamic” as a model type, etc. Expands the coverage of unit testing, demonstrating 5 ways to make mocking controllers easier.

Chapter 10: Controller Extensibility

The 1st edition’s “Controllers” chapter is now split in two – this second chapter now covers more advanced topics – custom filters, method selectors, controller factories, etc.

Updated to reflect changes in the ASP.NET MVC 2 request-processing pipeline, new built-in filters, HTTP Method Overriding, etc. Adds (a lot of) coverage of asynchronous controllers – not just how to use them, but how to measure their impact and avoid common misconfiguration problems.

Chapter 11: Views

Goes into detail about how automatic HTML encoding works. Coverage of HTML helper methods expanded for ASP.NET MVC 2 (there’s now over 50 helpers, and that’s before you even start counting all their different overloads). Explains new ways to render partials.

Chapter 12: Models

Most of this massive chapter is totally new, and goes into great detail about metadata, templating, and validation. Covers how the built-in templates work, creating custom ones, using HTML field prefixes, implementing custom metadata sources, consuming metadata, custom validation providers, custom client-side validation, doing all this inside a multi-tier architecture, etc.

The explanation of model binding and value providers is significantly updated to account for the new architecture in ASP.NET MVC 2.

Chapter 13: User Interface Techniques

This new chapter inherits UI-related material from various parts of the 1st edition book, including wizards, CAPTCHAs, child actions, master pages, open-source view engines, custom view engines. All updated to match ASP.NET MVC 2, of course.

Chapter 14: Ajax and Client Scripting

Updated various aspects of the code and explanations to account for new framework features, and to make things work with more recent versions of IE. Expanded the coverage of JSON data services, including security issues and ways to handle cross-domain requests. Some recommendations are updated to account for client-side performance considerations(browser’s rendering pipeline, CDNs, etc).

Chapter 15: Security and Vulnerability

Mostly the same as in the first edition. Shows an alternative tamper-proofing mechanism using MVC 2 code, plus describes JavaScript string encoding and its relation to script injection. Various code changes to fit in with ASP.NET MVC 2.

Chapter 16: Deployment

Radically restructured chapter – now all organized with step-by-step guides and checklists for each targeted IIS version, so now you only have to read the material relevant to you. Covers new deployment options, including combinations of .NET 3.5 SP1, .NET 4, Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2008 R2 Core, shared hosting, classic/integrated pipeline mode, etc. Accounts for many changes to these deployment environments since the 1st edition, including IIS 7.5-specific issues

Clearer explanations of various IIS request-processing mechanisms. A new section describes VS2010’s improved publishing and packaging mechanisms, config file transforms, etc.

Chapter 17: Using ASP.NET Core Platform Features

Mostly the same as in the first edition. Updated to account for ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS 7.5, with tweaks to code and explanations. Information about configuration APIs moved from Deployment chapter into this chapter.

Chapter 18: Migrating Existing Applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.0

Various updates relating to .NET 4 / VS2010 / ASP.NET MVC 2, including how to upgrade Web Forms applications to support MVC, using routing when combining MVC with Web Forms (both on .NET 3.5 and .NET 4), ways you can use Web Forms server controls with postbacks in MVC 2, should you wish to.

New section describes upgrading from ASP.NET MVC 1 – using automated tooling, doing it manually, a post-upgrade checklist, workarounds for potential problems.

OK, enough details

Of course, there are other ASP.NET MVC 2 books in the pipeline too. No doubt you’ll enjoy and benefit from any of them.

At last! Physical copies of my book have finally reached the public. I’ve been writing, tweaking, fixing, expanding, and polishing this since February 2008, following every preview release of ASP.NET MVC. Now it all reflects the final RTM version.

The design goal for this book is to give you, the reader, the most practical and detailed guide to virtually everything that ASP.NET MVC does. If you want to become your company’s expert on how this stuff really works – how to bend it to your will, how to apply best practises, and what limitations you’ll have to overcome – then I hope this is the book for you.

Download a sample chapter - an introductory tutorial that shows how to build a simple data-entry application with ASP.NET MVC.

Of course, other MVC books will become available over the next few months. I’ll look forward to reader feedback about how these compare.

To give you a feel for what’s covered, here’s the table of contents: