I am glad to be able to blog about my experiences prepping and teaching 10264 Developing Web Applications with Visual Studio 2010 in a series of posts.
I have taught the course 3 times; I am currently scheduled to teach it again at least 2 times in the very near future.
My first impression of the course, its contents and labs is positive. My student experiences have also been generally positive.
On a personal note I was very glad to see that the course content includes web development technologies besides Web Forms, including MVC 2.0 and JQuery.
MVC 2.0 and Web Forms are first compared at a high level in module 1. In this module I emphasize that MVC and Web Forms can be used together in the same Web site; they are not mutually exclusive. Many of my students are experienced Web Form developers. They had concerns that their investment in Web Form technology was going to be “obsoleted” by MVC.
To help illustrate to students that Web Forms and MVC could co-exist within the same project I added a Web Form (.aspx) with some simple server side code (i.e. display the date in a literal control) to the ASP.NET MVC web application created in the demonstration found in Module 1.3. I then display this Web Form (.aspx) in the browser to show that it works. This small demo showing that a project could host MVC and Web Forms helped ease student angst about any perceived fear of Web Form “obsolescence”.
As I moved to slides in Module 1.4 it seemed to work well to put breakpoints in the Web Form (aspx) server side code as well as in the HomeController Index action method. I make sure that the Index action is the current tab in Visual Studio. Then, I run the project in debug mode (F5). When the breakpoint is hit I display the Call Stack Debug window (be sure that the option Show External Code is selected; right click in the Call Stack Window to select this option). Note in the window that before the MVC .dlls there is a dll with a name System.Web.dll!System.Web.HttpApplication. Stop debugging. Then make the Web Form the start page and run the project in debug mode again. When the .aspx code breakpoint is hit, in the Call Stack window note that the System.Web.dll!System.Web.HttpApplication also appears.
This shows that both Web Forms and MVC share some common ASP.NET processing in the pipeline. This demonstration supports the slide materials in Module 1.4. I mention that certain ASP.NET features exist in both Web Forms and MVC as they reside in the common portion of the ASP.NET pipeline; for example output caching. I reinforce the concept that not only can Web Forms and MVC “live together” but that certain features work the exact same way, again noting that certain Web Form knowledge can be leveraged in the MVC world.
There certainly more for me to share—please stay tuned.