After a couple of false starts, I started digging into
learning ASP.NET MVC a couple of months or so ago.
First, I decided that I also wanted to learn webforms, just
in case.
Don’t look at me like that. I learned the error of my ways
after my eyes started to bleed and hands began reaching out of the walls for
me. Though I’m not sure that was caused exclusively by webforms. That may have
been caused in part by my recitation out of a book of really odd Latin poetry
that I ran across…
Either way, I stopped trying to learn webforms, so mission
accomplished. Now if the really creepy looking guy would stop making faces at
me in the mirror when I try to shave, that’d be great. Oh, wait, that’s me.
Sorry.
Next, I tried just diving in by starting with Professional
ASP.NET MVC by Galloway, Haack, Wilson, and Allen.
This, for me at least, was kind of a mistake. The first
couple of chapters were okay, but the first chapter on the topic of Views was
full of hand waving and a sense of go screw yourself. It all kind of boiled
down to “I’m not going to discuss the code. I’m just going to go off on
tangents that you don’t need right now.” (This is a pet peeve of mine)
That’s not to say that the book is bad. It’s actually quite
good as long as you have a rough idea of what’s going on (which I didn’t at the
time). Otherwise, it got a bit frustrating. I'm going back over the book now, in fact.
I ended up going online to find the
music store tutorial
that was mentioned in the book and working through that first. That worked a
lot better for me, but it could just be that I’m a bit slow. Who knows.
Going on the premise that I learn a lot better by playing
with something once I’ve figured out the basics, I decided to rebuild my
website with MVC. After all, it was just static pages, so I wouldn’t have to
worry much about the M portion of things.
As a result, I got a decent grounding in the use of
Controllers and spent a small mountain of time re-arranging the structure of
the website to comply with the MVC principles.
Of course, I also got to do some much needed housekeeping,
so that’s a plus. It just took loads of time because there were probably 40 or
so pages.
In all honesty, most of my frustration was dealing with CSS3
(the site’s last incarnation used CSS2 and a lot of things have changed) and
getting all of the settings right (both on my end and on my hosting provider)
to get web publishing to work from Visual Studio.
The site isn’t “finished”. I’ll probably always have things
that I want to do to it, but it is published. The visual changes are fairly minimal.
Mostly, the menu has just moved to the top instead of running down the left
side. However, things are a lot different on the back end.
Now I get to move on to more complex stuff.
Current mood: tired
Current music: David Gray – Babylon
