ASP.NET MVC: Building for Productivity and Maintainability

Course details

ASP.NET MVC provides great features and functionality out of the box, but there's more you can do to optimize your code. Learn how to build applications for long-term productivity and maintainability by streamlining your views, controllers, and models, in this deep dive course from Jess Chadwick. Discover how to separate application and business logic, reuse and simplify views, manage dependencies, reduce markup with HTML helpers, and apply patterns to increase productivity and simplify controller logic. Plus, learn how to take advantage of feature folders, which groups all necessary controllers, views, and models for a feature within a single folder, reducing navigation and search time and enabling feature scaling and code reuse.

Learning objectives
Creating separate projects for application and business logic
Customizing routes with attribute routing
Reusing views
Managing dependencies with dependency injection
Simplifying views
Reducing and reusing markup with HTML helpers
Creating view models to reduce view logic
Separating controllers and business logic
Simplifying controller logic with the Mediator pattern
Reorganizing to feature folders

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Improve the design of your ASP.NET MVC applications
02 - What you should know
03 - Using the exercise files
04 - Development environment setup

1. Going Beyond the Basics

05 - Differentiating the ASP.NET MVC framework and design pattern
06 - Examining your applications to find opportunities for improvement
07 - Creating separate projects for application and business logic

2. Quick Wins

08 - Enabling view compilation to detect errors at build time
09 - Reducing namespace references with global imports
10 - Customizing routes with attribute routing
11 - Reusing the same view for server-side and client-side rendering
12 - Better error logging with ELMAH
13 - Managing dependencies with dependency injection

3. Simplifying Your Views

14 - Using extension methods to remove magic strings
15 - Using extension methods to strongly type common actions
16 - Creating custom HTML helpers to reduce and reuse markup
17 - Using child actions to generate complex common markup
18 - Challenge - Use a child action to make a smarter HTML helper
19 - Solution - Use a child action to make a smarter HTML helper

4. Reducing View Logic with View Models

20 - Creating a view model to contain view logic
21 - Populating a view model with data
22 - Updating a view to use a view model

5. Separating Controllers and Business Logic

23 - Reducing duplicate code with custom action filters
24 - Creating explicit contracts with request objects
25 - Moving business logic from a controller to a service
26 - Consuming a service from a controller
27 - Challenge - Creating a model validation action filter
28 - Solution - Creating a model validation action filter

6. Simplifying Controller Logic with the Mediator Pattern

29 - Understanding the Mediator pattern
30 - Installing and configuring MediatR
31 - Creating the handler
32 - Consuming the handler in a controller

7. Reorganizing to Feature Folders

33 - Understanding the feature folders approach
34 - Creating feature folders
35 - Enabling location of feature views

Conclusion

36 - Next steps