Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Chapter 1. The Model-View-Controller Pattern

The first three chapters of this book give you the foundation on which you will build up your knowledge about the ASP.NET MVC framework.

The ASP.NET MVC framework, unlike traditional ASP.NET programming, incorporates the usage of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. So, before you look at how the framework works, it's critical that you understand how the pattern on which it's based works. Then, in the following chapters, you learn how Microsoft implements that pattern in its library and how to write your first ASP.NET MVC Web application.

In this chapter you learn:

• The principles behind this pattern

• How the MVC pattern works

• The other advantages that it provides

The History of MVC

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, even if it gained popularity only recently, mainly thanks to Ruby on Rails and to the ASP.NET MVC framework, is not new. It was invented back in the 1970s by Trygve Reenskaug, a Norwegian computer scientist. The original pattern, named Thing-Model-View-Editor, was invented to solve a problem of the shipbuilding industry in Norway. They had the need to build information systems that could easily fit into existing organizations and be adapted for their continual development.

The pattern was later renamed to Model-View-Controller when Trygve worked with the SmallTalk group at Xerox PARC. A year later other researchers at Xerox PARC implemented a version of MVC and included it into the Smalltalk-80 class library, thus making ...