Net ASP

I was so excited to find a comprehensive book on ASP.NET MVC which included examples in VB, and I dived in eagerly. My hopes soared, but it all came crashing down early in Chapter 2. The author uses a data-access model called “Entity Data Models” or some such. After wasting most of the day trying to figure out why nothing he was describing actually appeared among my VS2008 options, uninstalling and reinstalling half my MS updates, and clicking on dead links at microsoft.com, I’ve realized that it was all some fly-by-night Microsoft gimmick that they quickly abandoned and are trying to pretend never existed. Since everything else in the book is built from these “entities,” the examples in the book are essentially useless. It’s too bad, and it marks the end of my dalliance with MVC. Microsoft has wasted enough of my time, and I am way behind schedule with nothing to show.
Rating: 1 / 5

I bought Stephen Walther’s ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed after several months of working on a legacy C and C++ project which looks nothing like Walther’s book. Following that I spent many a happy Saturday and Sunday ramping up on Ruby on Rails, but finally giving up to revisit my Microsoft skills. ASP.NET MVC is a serious attempt by Microsoft to lure wayward Ruby on Rails types like me back into the fold, and I consider myself re-folded.

Given my background, any halfway decent book on ASP.NET MVC would probably have been welcome, but Walther’s book is especially welcome because it makes a serious attempt to treat ASP.NET MVC in the context of Test Driven Development. Well, all of that is what you’d expect if you take the cynical view that Microsoft is competing for developer mind share against Ruby on Rails, where the tests are “baked right in” (of course they all pass by default, but that’s another story). But Walther’s book is far more than a cheerleading book about TDD, and actually gets you into how to structure your code to support it. Using a generic repository class and relying heavily on the dependency injection pattern, Walther leads you through setting up your code so that it’s loosely coupled, testable, and (presumably) easily refactored.

Admittedly, it sometimes looks like Walther’s approach takes too much manual lifting compared to Ruby on Rails — and that’s especially true when you run into Microsoft annoyances like not being able to refresh an Entity Data Model from the database. On the other hand, it’s hard for an experienced software developer not to take a skeptical view of the magical rails “we can build a blog in 15 minutes” approach to the world. But still I feel that the techniques Walther talks about are the kind of thing that I really need to try out on an application or two.

I gave the book four stars because there were a few sections that I thought could have been explained better. For example, I used his chapter on deployment almost immediately to create an application that supports both “legacy” ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, and the information there worked great, but I felt the file differences could have been narrowed down a bit more. Also in his discussion of the generic repository, I felt like we lost sight of the model there for awhile. Since there was a lot of ground to cover, a general overview discussing how the Entity Data Framework, the model, the repository and the service layer were all going to tie together might have been helpful. My final quibble is that I felt there could have been a bit more material on the relationships among the Entity Data Framework, LINQ, and LINQ to SQL. I think Walther’s book gave the impression that the EDF and LINQ are orthogonal, whereas other Microsoft sources lead me to believe they’re more complimentary.

Despite its flaws, however, I want to leave you with the title of my review, that this is one of the best programming books I’ve read in a long time. It’s the kind of book that expands your horizons and makes you want to try things out the way the author has outlined. To be sure, Walther’s book is not the book you want to read if you goal is to hack together an unstructured ASP.NET MVC application in record time. But if your goal is to learn ASP.NET MVC while becoming a better programmer along the way, this book merits your serious attention and you should be pulling your credit card out now.
Rating: 4 / 5

First of all, let me say, I don’t own this book. I browsed through it several times on the stand trying to make up my mind whether or not to buy. The first thing that threw me with this title. It was huge! I thought that meant packed with good information, but not really. My major prejudice is that ALL examples are done in C# and VB, which (for me) adds unnecessary pages. Also, almost the last 1/4 of this book simply steps you through using the principles to build a “real world” application. It felt like a lot was simply being restated with no extra goodies.

I was leaning towards this book because it covers some Entity Framework (while most of the other MVC books out there focus on Linq2SQL). But, most of the stuff was bland, one or two liners.

The Models chapter was interesting. Took the normal Repository pattern to the next level with a Generic Repository.

Lastly, it was just PURE ASP MVC: “This is how this is done”. Everything focuses on the Microsoft way (which is great, if that’s what you’re looking for). For example, the Authentication chapter was disappointing. Only mentioned a few things (Replacing the Provider for Membership Authentication) “were possible”, instead of how to do them.

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework is a nice, compact, “real world”, up and running book. Nice non-standard tips like Validation using xVal and jQuery’s Validation plugin, and Ajax using jQuery and it’s Forms plugin. Lots of tidbits here and there about cool extra things that may help your process.
Rating: 3 / 5

This is a very useful book. It very quickly tells you how to build web applications with ASP.NET MVC. Yes, it’s not the most detailed and does not give you the background on all of the topics, but if you want to quickly start developing your application, this is the book for you. There is very little that is superfluous and most of the topics are to the point. And best of all, you are not distracted by the kind of painfully contrived humor that you find in most other books.
Rating: 5 / 5

By far, this book is the best of the ASP.NET MVC books currently available. While at first it was a bit difficult with both VB and C# code in the examples, I soon got past that, and came to appreciate why both .NET languages were included. What I especially like is the detailed instruction on how to use LINQ 2 SQL and/or the Entity Framework in building an MVC site. The included Generic Repository code is great.

The examples are clear, the writing is concise yet very explanatory. Best of all the code just works. I run the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group (www.iedotnetug.org), and we are teaching a free MVC class to the community. I wish this book had been available when we were planning the class. We will probably suggest this book for future classes.

This is the first book by Stephen I have read, and I look forward to reading his other and future books.

James Johnson

Founder and President, Inland Empire .NET User’s Group

Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev
Rating: 5 / 5