I’ve been using ASP.NET MVC for personal projects since before it hit RTM.
I am preparing a presentation for my colleagues to introduce them to basic concepts of ASP.NET MVC and show them how it could be used in our environment.
My presentation has a 15 minute limit. There is a lot of information to relay (especially if you factor in projects like MVCContrib and various blog posts).
What topics should I focus on?
Some context: I work for a digital agency. My colleagues are .NET developers with 3+ years of ASP.NET experience.
What’s been suggested so far:
- Reasons for wanting to switch to ASP.NET MVC
- Routing
- ActionResults (ability to serve different responses)
- Request-Response internals
- Testability
- Scaffolding (T4 templates)
- Fine-grained control over HTML output
- Separation of concerns ()
- Differences between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC
You only have time for 2 or 3 main points.
The most important concept to grasp is that requests arrive at controllers then the controller chooses what view to present the results the controller has generated.
The next important concept is that MVC has its big win over the “classic” ASP.NET when you create unit tests for your controllers and the model. Without this MVC is just another way to skin a cat.
For a final point I would focus on the structure of URLs not because its that important but because we like things that have a clean feel and MVC Urls can do that, this may help generate a positive response.
Avoid going on about there being no server controls (which isn’t entirely true) since that is likely to elicite a negative response. In general avoid mentioning what is doesn’t do compared with ASP.NET forms (although there not being any need for Viewstate is worth mentioning in passing). You know that the benefits out weigh the things that are missing (or unnecessary) but your audience does not. Keep it positive.