Getting Started – Walkthrough


Let’s start by understanding what this toolkit is about, why it was created and some of the goals for it, and then get into how to use and learn from it.
Remember -> its just a sample toolkit!

Toolkit Background

We built this toolkit as a first example of a developer focused pattern toolkit, using a common (if not very broad) design pattern. An example of a common and well-known pattern, that is relevant to most developers, and anyone can install and use right away. We also noticed that although ASP.NET MVC ships in Visual Studio with some good development tools (i.e. template, and some menus on folder in VS), its still does not use much abstraction, and relies on the developers starting at understanding MVC at the class level rather than at a higher abstract level.
The toolkit builds ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Applications in VS2010 and ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Applications in VS2012.

Why doesn't it use the latest MVC?
Can it be upgraded to the latest MVC version?
Is this toolkit supposed to be THE way we are supposed to build ASP.NET MVC applications? The premise of the toolkit is to give an example of how an organization could have decided that this is the BEST way they see building their ASP.NET MVC applications. That’s the power of toolkits really. The fact that any individual/organization/community can define their recommended way to develop or deploy some technology.

This pattern toolkit demonstrates many of the most common things a application developer would need help in doing in applying the MVC pattern, over and above what the built-in Visual Studio tooling provides you.

It can easily be extended and adapted for your own organization/community etc. But all that is getting too far ahead of ourselves for now.
So let’s start first by getting a look at this toolkit and what it does, then we can start to understand more about how it does it, and how we can learn from it to perhaps build our own toolkit, using some of the techniques seen with this one.

Installing the Toolkit

Pre-requisites

Toolkit Install

Creating an MVC Project

Its time to see how this thing works..