A recently announced free course on Code School is about making web sites with the MVC pattern and C# ASP.NET. Given the current trend for MVC these days, this course presents a good opportunity for experiencing it from a .NET perspective.

Despite being a lightweight introduction, just three levels deep, and with just two goals to complete, Try .NET MVC manages to meet its goal of providing a quick and easy to follow guide to the Microsoft way of doing MVC.

These three levels comprise of a mix of videos that feature instructor Eric Fisher, who talks  you through the concepts, and assisted exercises to be carried out inside Code School's browser based IDE. There are just two goals to complete: add Names to a list and then display those Names. 

As with all Code School's courses there absolutely has to be a theme that surrounds the presentation. In this case it is a medieval story, complete with Knights, Dragons and Castles, that somehow manages to blend in MVC and C# in the theme's song context! Crazy stuff that you either love or hate, me belonging to the latter category because it gives me a sense of not being serious enough.

But, as always, the professionalism exhibited by Code School's instructors, as well as the level of detail that is put into the production, prove me wrong every time. So don't let the goofy themeology fool you too, but just focus on the material instead.      

The three levels are organized as:

Level 1 Model View Controller

 Introduction to MVC

•  Creating a View
•  Creating a Controller

 Routing

•  Default Route
•  Standard Route
•  Route Less Travelled

 Models

•  Creating a Model 

Level 2 Getting User Input

Input

•  Create Our Create Action
•  Set Up Our Input Form

Level 3  Retaining Data

•  Set Our View To Use lists
•  Create Our Global Variable
•  Set Up Our Model
•  Wiring Up Our Controller 

Knowledge of C# is not presumed, since the reader is presented  with parts of the language, like importing namespaces with the "using" directive, that an experienced C# programmer ought to be familiar with, therefore making it clear that the course targets inexperienced developers in either C# or ASP.NET.

 
The exercises or Challenges, are assisted in that you're given precise,  coupled with hints, directions on what you should do, such as:

"Create a public Create action that returns an IActionResult and accepts a string EquipmentName. Then, inside of that new action, return an empty View()"

The code is partially pre-written, and just requires filling the blanks in order for the exercise to become completed.   

Following the instructions to the letter should not pose any difficulties, but there are two issues that I've encountered when trying out the challenges.

First the IDE had no auto-completion, a no-no when having to write code in a statically typed language like C# and secondly, I've encountered a subtle bug in Level 3's Challenge no 2 which requires to "Set Our View To Use lists"

In that challenge you have to tweak the code from :

@model CharacterSheetApp.Models.Equipment
<h2>Equipment:</h2>
<form asp-action="Create">
  <div>
    <input name="EquipmentName" />
    <input type="submit" value="Add Equipment" />
  </div>
</form>
<h4>Equipment:</h4>
<div>
  <ul>
    <li>
      <label>@Model.Name</label>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

to accommodate a List and then iterate through it printing its contents:

@model List<CharacterSheetApp.Models.Equipment>
<h2>Equipment:</h2>
<form asp-action="Create" class="form-inline mbm">
  <div class="form-group">
    <input name="EquipmentName" class="form-control" />
    <input class="btn" type="submit" value="Add Equipment" />
  </div>
</form>
<h4>Equipment:</h4>
<div>
  <ul>
     @foreach (var x in Model)
      {
	<li>
	  <label>@x.Name</label>
	</li>
      }
  </ul>
</div>

The problem is that despite the code being correct, it wouldn't compile
emitting the same

"So close. We have our foreach loop but the item in our list is not correct"

error every time.

I submitted the issue to the class's forum to get further guidance.
Within a couple of hours, the instructor himself, Eric, replied that it was definitely a bug and that the Code School devs were made aware of it. Only a little while later, the issue was fixed so I could continue with the rest of the exercises (although the platform is giving you the option to skip problematic challenges and continue anyway).

So hats off to Code School for its almost real time support, an aspect all too important especially when undertaking paid classes.

As far as the content itself goes, it is structured around the typical  MVC workflow. Thus, Level 1 is shows how the MVC components are  organized into files and folders as well as how they're associated and resolved at runtime. Then it goes through creating Views, the Controller and its links to the Model.

Level 1 used hardcoded values to keep matters simple, but what we are really after is a form which allows users to enter their own data. That's a matter for Level 2.

Level 3 completes the class by showing how to feed the user supplied data to the Controller which subsequently will persist it (no database) to a global singleton generic List. After that it's just a matter of  displaying that data back to the users through an outputting HTML View.

There you have it, a nice, simple and free introduction to MVC from  .NET's perspective. 

More Information

Try .NET MVC

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