If you are following my blog since at least a few years you know that one of my main interest is the possibility to extend ASP.NET MVC and fine tune it to fit your (and your team’s) needs.
One of my most popular posts is 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know, which I published almost 2 years and half ago (and was based on ASP.NET MVC v1). Still on the same subject I gave a two hours long presentation at Umbraco CodeGarden ‘10 Mvc Pre-Conf: ASP.NET MVC Extensibility.
To try and push the concept that Extending ASP.NET MVC is a best practice and a must for all web applications that are more than a simple demo, I signed up with RedGate to write a series of articles about ASP.NET MVC; series that will be published on their developers’ portal Simple-Talk in the course of the next months.
The 10 articles will cover most of the extensibility points of ASP.NET MVC, following the processing pipeline: from the routing and till the view (and the design time customization possibilities).
The first article has been published last week: An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Extensibility, and contains also a wall-chart with all the processing pipeline of ASP.NET MVC.
The titles of the articles are not final yet, but here is a list of the topics that will be covered during the next months:
- An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Extensibility (21 Sept 2011)
- ASP.NET MVC Routing Extensibility (9 Dec 2011)
- How to modify the way your controllers are created
- Filters (Auth, Action, Results) and FilterProvider
- Action extensibility (Action Method selector and Action Results)
- Customizing how data is fed into the controllers
- Validation (client-side, server-side and IObjectValidator)
- Custom Templates
- View extensibility: Custom view engines and view helpers
- Design time extensibility
For the moment it’s based on ASP.NET MVC 3, but will switch to ASP.NET MVC 4 as soon as it is released (if this happens before the end of the series).
And a big thanks go to the editor, Chris Massey, that help a lot with the style of the article and Eilon Lipton, which, as happened the other times he was my tech reviewer, caught all non technically perfect or unclear statements and helped setting them right. And to Andrew Clarke, the editor of Simple-Talk, for helping with the chart.
Also thanks to Hadi Hariri for the inspiration he gave me with his 2 talks about ASP.NET MVC at BeLux TechDays: ASP.NET MVC Deep Dive and Getting the most out of ASP.NET MVC.
Let me know what you think about the first article of the series, and if there are some extensibility you would me to cover in particular or some questions you would like to ask.
Hope you will find the series interesting.