Chapter 17. Building Modern Websites with ASP.NET 5
In This Chapter
Creating a Web Application with ASP.NET 5/MVC 6
Writing ASP.NET Server Code (Models and Controllers)
Coding for the UI (Views and Related Web UI Elements)
Modern website development is about building applications that take advantage of the client device using common client-side frameworks; render the UI appropriately based on screen size; and help developers build solutions for corporate websites, collaboration portals, enterprise business solutions, and mobile apps/games. Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET 5 give developers the flexibility to build all types of these web-based solutions. This includes support for the traditional ASP.NET Web Forms model, the Razor Web Pages approach, sites built on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, service applications built on Web API, single-page applications (SPAs) that leverage client-side frameworks such as AngularJS, and mobile solutions that use HTML5 and Cordova to run natively on a device.
Visual Studio supports all these various models, approaches, and templates for building web applications. We cover a number of these in this book. This chapter is about web fundamentals, ASP.NET 5, and MVC sites. Chapter 18, “Using JavaScript and Client-Side Frameworks,” covers client-side frameworks used to build single-page applications (SPA). We cover Web API (and WCF) services in Chapter 19, “Building and Consuming Services with Web API and WCF.” The final chapter in the book, Chapter 25, “Writing Cross-Platform Mobile Applications with Apache Cordova,” covers building mobile applications with HTML5 and Cordova.
The ASP.NET/web topic is huge. We are not able to dig in on its every aspect. Instead, we choose to concentrate on areas where modern web development happens, including ASP.NET 5, client frameworks, web services, and mobile.
One notable omission is ASP.NET Web Forms. Microsoft continues to invest in this approach; it is very much part of Visual Studio 2015. However, we have observed that, like ASP before it, Web Forms is becoming a legacy technology. There are great resources available on the web (as well as prior editions of this book) should you need to work with Web Forms.
We also expect that, as you build your ASP.NET applications, you will discover places that require further exploration. Again, this is a large topic with many twists and turns. To that end, we point out some of these as we move through these web chapters. Some additional examples include user membership, caching, website administration, and more.