Adventures in MVC
Alternately titled, learning how to design a site all over again.
In college, I learned ASP. It was a new technology and it made it really easy for me to develop web pages because I could put in html (which I was comfortable with) and then add hooks where the code needed to go. I mean, I had done a little cgi (enough to get a person on the hall in my dorm to crash my server with a buffer overflow attack), but ASP was a step up from that.
In my first job I created a whole bug tracking application before there even was a bugzilla, and it may be partially in use today. There was a problem, though, in that ASP code was typically difficult to maintain. Many people complain that BASIC lends itself to spaghetti code, and I found that ASP could be worse because you would have code littered in among your html tags, and if you goofed up the special asp tags it could take you a while to find the right place to put your code to get the whole page running again. Two words: Maintenance Nightmare.
It’s at this point in time that I took classes to learn C# and the Microsoft .Net framework. Here was a language that I could understand and get behind. It abstracted away the code part to a code-behind file, and then left me with cleaner html, with some markup additions.
Except for when a new guy arrived on our team, singing the praises of MVC. Promising better unit testing (something I’m growing to see the value of) and better separation of duties, MVC also seemed to promise that I’d write better code—something I’ve been wanting to do.
So, I’m taking the plunge and creating my first MVC website. I’m reading through all the “my first mvc website” code and I’ve created my first project with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2013. So, on top of teaching my kids Small Basic–something I’ve got to get back to telling you how it’s going—I will be writing about my adventures and my project and the things I find along the way. For me, it’s a way to track where I’ve been. If there is a you out there, maybe you’ll get to learn something from my experiences.
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