Foreword

I'm thrilled to introduce this book covering the latest release of ASP.NET MVC, written by an outstanding team of authors. They are my friends, but more importantly, they are fantastic technologists.

Phil Haack was the Program Manager ASP.NET MVC from the very start. With a background rooted in community and open source, I count him not only as an amazing technologist but also a close friend. While at Microsoft, Phil also worked on a new .NET Package Manager called NuGet.

Brad Wilson is not only my favorite skeptic but also a talented Developer at Microsoft working on ASP.NET MVC. From Dynamic Data to Data Annotations to Testing and more, there's no end to Brad's knowledge as a programmer. He's worked on many open source projects, such as XUnit .NET, and continues to push people both inside and outside Microsoft towards the light.

Jon Galloway is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft focused on Azure and ASP.NET. In that role, he's had the opportunity to work with thousands of developers who are both new to and experienced with ASP.NET MVC. He's the author of the MVC Music Store tutorial, which has helped hundreds of thousands of new developers write their first ASP.NET MVC applications. Jon also helped organize mvcConf and aspConf — a series of free, online conferences for ASP.NET developers. His interactions with the diverse ASP.NET community give him some great insights on how developers can begin, learn, and master ASP.NET MVC.

And last but not least, K. Scott Allen rounds out the group, not just because of his wise decision to use his middle name to sound smarter, but also because he brings his experience and wisdom as a world-renowned trainer. Scott Allen is a member of the Pluralsight technical staff and has worked on websites for Fortune 50 companies, as well as consulted with startups. He is kind, thoughtful, respected, and above all, knows his stuff backwards and forwards.

These fellows have teamed up to take this ASP.NET MVC 4 book to the next level, as the ASP.NET web development platform continues to grow. The platform currently is used by millions of developers worldwide. A vibrant community supports the platform, both online and offline; the online forums at www.asp.net average thousands of questions and answers a day.

ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC 4 power news sites, online retail stores, and perhaps your favorite social networking site. Your local sports team, book club, or blog uses ASP.NET MVC 4, as well.

When it was introduced, ASP.NET MVC broke a lot of ground. Although the pattern was old, it was new to many in the existing ASP.NET community; it walked a delicate line between productivity and control, power and flexibility. Today, to me, ASP.NET MVC 4 represents choice — your choice of language, your choice of frameworks, your choice of open source libraries, your choice of patterns. Everything is pluggable. MVC 4 epitomizes absolute control of your environment — if you like something, use it; if you don't like something, change it. You can unit test how you want, create components as you want, and use your choice of JavaScript framework.

ASP.NET MVC 4 brings you a new ASP.NET Web API (a new framework for building HTTP services), updated default project templates that leverage modern web standards, solid mobile web application support, enhanced support for asynchronous methods, and more.

Just as exciting, the ASP.NET MVC code is now released under an open source license that accepts contributions from the developer community. Perhaps code you write will ship with the next version of ASP.NET MVC! I encourage you to visit www.asp.net/mvc for fresh content, new samples, videos, and tutorials.

We all hope this book, and the knowledge within, represents the next step for you in your mastery of ASP.NET MVC 4.

— Scott Hanselman
Principal Community Architect
Azure Web Team
Microsoft