ASP.Net MVC Quick Start

Build a basic CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) web application with MVC and the Entity Framework in a weekend.

This course is a very quick workshop to take you through the basic actions that will be required for you to create an awesome CRUD web application in just a few hours (you could do it over a weekend very easily) using ASP.Net MVC, the Entity Framework (code-first development approach), and the built-in scaffolding capabilities of ASP.Net MVC.

MVC = Model, View, Controller, and is a well-known and established design pattern. Microsoft has made it extremely easy and convenient to create your web solutions using this pattern. In Microsoft's MVC framework, we find that convention is favored over configuration, so as long as we follow a few simple guidelines, the system will do a lot of the work for us.

We'll also be taking a quick look at how we can use the Entity Framework to easily model and create a database for us. By using the code-first approach, we'll simply create our models and then look at writing a DBContext to store the models. We'll also create an initializer class which will see our database for us, so that we can quickly and easily test our system.

After we've learned about the different aspects of our application, we'll quickly create a controller and use ASP.Net MVC's built-in view and scaffolding generators to easily build our CRUD operations against our database.

Other things we will learn throughout the course involve the use of Git for source control, pushing our repository to BitBucket, and linking an AppHarbor project to BitBucket so that we can get continuous integration setup.

To close out the course, we'll put DataTables.js on our Index view so that we can easily show the data, as well as provide built-in javascript tools that will filter and sort the data for us.

By the end of the course, you'll be familiar with the major working parts of creating an Asp.Net MVC CRUD application and publishing to a public-facing website with a fairly nice and responsive UI. You'll have working knowledge of Models, Views, and Controllers, as well as how they interact to create a functional web application. You'll also be exposed to the Entity Framework and Code First Migrations with use of a SQL Server backend. The best part is that although this sounds pretty daunting, it's actually quite easy with a majority of the work done for us.