Complete ASP NET MVC Web Development – Newbie to Ninja!

An introduction to the course and what we will be learning.

How to get and install Visual Studio. Kind of important. :-)

How to Install SQL Express & the Management Tools 

A brief introduction about this section of the course - C# Basics - and what we will be covering.

All C# and Web Development projects must start with a 'Hello World' project. It's an unwritten law of the Universe. So let's get started and see just how easy it is to create a fully functional C# Program!

So we have our very first C# program - but what are all those files about? In this lecture we'll examine the anatomy of a C# program and look what happens when it get's 'compiled'.

How do we create 'objects' of our own devising? What happens when the built in C# 'types' just don't cut the mustard? In this lecture we examine how we can create classes and structs to build our programs.

How do you store lists of information in a C# Program? This lecture explores the options for storing, sorting and searching lists of information.

All programs need to respond to information and execute code depending on user choices and actions. In this lecture we introduce at a high level the options available for controlling the flow of your program, before going into more details in the following lectures.

All software has a hiccup sometimes. In this lecture we look at the basics of debugging your C# application.

Object Orientated Programming (OOP) is often overlooked by new developers assuming they will 'pick it up' - however it's best to learn the concepts from the beginning. This lecture will give you a brief overview of what OOP actually is and why we need it.

Learning is easier by doing - take a walkthrough creating and using classes.

Now you've learnt the basics, I'll show you so of the more advanced things you can do with classes and their usage.

In this lecture we will discuss what a LIBRARY is, and how we can use namespaces to group and partition our code whilst preventing conflicts.

Some of the basic 'features' of OOP - honestly - it's NOT that scary!

Explanation of public, private, internal and virtual access modifiers when declaring classes, properties and methods.

This book is a brief introduction and reference to what we have been learning so far. I normally sell this on Amazon, but it's free to all my hard working students :-)

Click the resources tab to get the Playground Project used in the OOP Lectures

SOLID is a set of guidelines for writing easily maintained code. Top developers (the ones who make the big bucks) try to follow these guidelines to make their life easier and code faster. They are also a must if you ever want to work in a larger team on larger projects.

The S in SOLID. Learn about the Single Responsibility Principle and how we use it to break code up and to nice simple classes.

The O in SOLID. Best practices for building classes in regards to updating and extending your software.

The L in SOLID. This principle teaches you to write code that can be easily replaced and swapped out.

The I in SOLID. This principle works in conjunction with the Liskov Principle to build code that can be made modular.

The D in SOLID. Dependency Inversion is perhaps one of the biggest growing patterns in software development. It is essential to understand and paves the way for better Testing and modularity of your code. The lecture provides the theory, and then you'll implement it in a real world scenario in the 'Building a data layer' section.

Slides from the previous lectures in PDF Format - handy for reference!

Test how well you understand SOLID Principles!

Get started building your first ASP.NET MVC website - and see just how easy it is.

With your first ASP.NET MVC site built, we'll walkthrough the main components and structure of the site.

The C in MVC - Controllers manage the flow of data from Models to Views - learning about the basics of Controllers in this and the next lecture.

Continuing our look at Controllers and how they work.

Once our MVC controllers are built they need to push information to a View - learn the basics of HTML Views here.

The final part of the MVC Acronym - Models.  Learn how they work in conjunction with Views and Controllers.

With the basics in place, lets start to push data from our Views to the 'backend' Controllers.

Visual Studio has a tool called Scaffolding that makes the creation of Views fast and simple. Start by Scaffolding out a customer list.

Continuing our look at Scaffolding, see how we can create 'POST' forms for creating objects.

Now we can create and view a list of objects, see how easy it is to view and edit those objects.

What can be created needs to be deleted - again Scaffolding makes it quick and easy.

Learn how to easily implement basic validation into your user Interfaces without needing any Javascript at all!

Learn about the different kinds of Partial Views and when they can be used.

Have you learnt your M from your V & C's? Test your knowledge!

Create an MVC website with ASP.NET Security

With the ASP.NET Template in place, let's have a walk through some of the scaffolded code.

Learn how to extend the existing user model with additional fields.

Get started building a Real World application using professional development practices.

How to access my code from the these lectures

Install the Visual Studio integrated GitHub client and connect it to your account

Build of the base solution the right way

NuGet packages are often updated - however these updates can themselves cause issues.  We examine how to manage and update packages, and what to do when it goes wrong!

Start building out our product models and basic storage mechanism

With the models in place, scaffold out the management pages for creating, editing and deleting products.

Add some grouping to products with Categories, and implement a data driven drop down to constrain choices - this is a bigger subject than it sounds, and this is just the first part!

Finishing off our Product Category management pages,

Getting tired of continually repeating nearly the same code?  Implement a Generic repository that can handle any model without re-coding for each one.

After generics, Dependency Inversion and Injection helps further create dynamic classes.

Use Microsoft's Unity DI Containers, built for use with ASP.NET MVC

Use Entity Framework to start building a SQL based database.

Use the earlier Generic repository model to implement a SQL based version.

Now we have a real data layer, start uploading Images to your products.

With the management pages all done, create a sale based product list.

Add filtering to our product pages using the Product Categories.

eCommerce sites need to allow users to add products to a basket - start by examining the options and the workflows used,

Step one in building our Basket is creating the BasketModels

Rather than connect directly to a Database, we will create a separate Basket Service that encapsulates the required logic.

Part 2 of the Basket Service

With our service in place, let's now hook up our Basket pages.

What are Unit Tests and why do we have them?

Using Mocks to test the database and Controllers

Continuing on from the previous lecture about how to setup your Mocks

With our basics in place, create some tests to check our basket works

Finishing off the basket tests

Start the customer journey by integrating the additional customers details into the normal user creation process.

Take the next step of the customer journey by creating orders from the basket.

Add Unit Tests to make sure our backend process is working as it should.

With our tests in place, finish off the order process by adding the final view pages.

The final step on the customer journey is to ensure our orders are linked to our customers.