ASP.NET MVC Advanced Topics

AJAX with ASP.NET MVC
Hi. This is Scott Allen of Pluralsight and in this module I want to show you how to introduce AJAX functionality into an ASP. NET MVC application. Specifically, I want to show you how to implement some common AJAX scenarios in a webpage such as building an Auto-complete text box or updating a portion of the screen. In order to do that, we'll cover a couple different areas. We'll look at the AJAX helpers that are built-in to the MVC Framework and we'll also use the ASP. NET AJAX Client Libraries. There was a slight addition to the client libraries to help support MVC applications. We'll see how to manage those scripts and what scripts are available when we start an MVC application. We'll also be using AJAX in partial views in the MVC Framework to update a portion of the page. So, instead of doing a full post back to the web server or full get request to the web server and updating an entire page, we'll just update pieces of the screen and make the application look a little more responsive and use less bandwidth. We'll be using the jQuery library quite regularly in this module and we do assume that you already have some knowledge of the AJAX Client Libraries and jQuery. These modules are available in Pluralsight on demand so you might want to go back and review this if you haven't look at the AJAX Client Libraries or jQuery yet. I'll also show you how to consume JSON result for a controller action or from a WCF web service so that you can update a page and make it responsive.

TDD and ASP.NET MVC
Hi, this is Scott Allen of Pluralsight. And in this module we're going to be looking at test-driven design with the ASP. NET MVC framework. Specifically, I want to first talk about what TDD is. It turns out it's really not about testing. Test-driven development or test-driven design is really a design process. And I hope I can show you how that flow works when you're in the TDD mindset. Then I'll show you some specific techniques you can use with the MVC framework to test your controllers and also to test the routes to make sure that an HTTP request reaches the proper action. We'll talk a little bit about test doubles which are stubs and fakes and mocks and I also want to give you a demonstration to some of the refactoring tools that are out there that can make the TDD process easier for you.

Deploying ASP.NET MVC Applications
Hi, this is Scott Allen of Pluralsight. And in this module, we'll talk about configuring and deploying ASP. NET MVC applications. Specifically, we're going to look at the configuration files for. NET, how they're structured, the sections that you can find inside, and we'll talk about the hierarchical nature of how settings are applied for a specific runtime environment. So we'll look out where the config files are located and talk about their precedence in determining the configuration settings. We'll also look at the relationship between ASP. NET MVC and Internet Information Services. We'll see how applications work in IIS and how those are mapped to an application pool. And we'll see how to configure IIS to run an MVC application. We'll also look at Web Deployment Projects. Web Deployment Projects are a free add-in that you can download from Microsoft, install it into Visual Studio and it provides a number of useful options that you can use for building an MVC application and getting it ready for production.

Leveraging the ASP.NET Infrastructure
Hi! This is Scott Allen of Pluralsight and this module is ASP. NET Infrastructure. In this module we're going to look at some of the core runtime features that are available in the ASP. NET platform to both web forms and MVC applications. This is a diverse collection of topics. And some of them we talked a little bit about before in previous modules but we haven't gone into any detail. The common thread among this diverse collection of topics is that they are features available in the core platform. They are available to both web forms and MVC applications. However, we're going to see that most of these behave a little bit differently when you are in an MVC context where they need to be configured differently. So we're going to look at caching using the output cache attribute on controllers and actions. Also how to associate that attribute with a cache profile if you want to configure your caching declaratively. We're also going to take a look at the caching programmatic API. We're going to talk about internationalization and localization with resource files. I also want to look at diagnostics that are available in the ASP. NET platform. We're going to talk about the membership and role providers that are available to provide authentication and authorization features to your application. I will also talk about some of the state management features that are available in ASP. NET.

Best Practices for ASP.NET MVC
Hi! This is Scott Allen of Pluralsight and this module covers Best Practices for ASP. NET MVC. In this module, I want to talk about some of the guiding principles that you should keep in the forefront of your mind when you're building an application with the MVC framework. We're going to look at some of these principles that you should apply when you're implementing your views, or when you're implementing your controllers. We'll also talk about some of the security best practices and wind things up with some general tips.