How much ASP.NET should I learn if my final goal is ASP.NET MVC?

Question

Starting from scratch with very little knowledge of .NET, how much ASP.NET should I learn before I start to dive in ASP.NET MVC?

Answer 1

Actually, I would posit that you should learn very little traditional ASP.NET webforms, or not at all.

ASP.NET MVC uses a totally different paradigm than "traditional" ASP.NET webforms, and unlearning part of it is almost a requisite. The core engine of ASP.NET webforms -- the Page Lifecycle and the Viewstate -- are both absent in ASP.NET MVC.

This is especially true if you come from a background that is more akin to MVC, like PHP, or Ruby on Rails.

Answer 2

Buy a simple book and go thorugh the asp.net mvc nerddinner example of scottgu. It will cover all the aspect of the real application.

here is the link: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/28/free-asp-net-mvc-nerddinner-tutorial-now-in-html.aspx

and here is the real site: www.nerddinner.com

Answer 3

Ideally you should learn MVC first as it forces you to learn and understand the various parts of the web such as HTTP Requests, the statelessness of the web, HTML, CSS, etc.

As a result, if you ever decide to use webforms, or are forced to use webforms, you understand how things are abstracted away and can better code to the efficiencies of the application.

The appeal of drag and drop from webforms might be very very appealing at first. But after a little time, you can see how nice MVC is for the fact that it forces you to take total control of your code from the get go.

Personally, I dabbled in webforms for a little bit -- but after using MVC, there's no going back. And on a side not, MVC is built on top of webforms, so you can always use them if you want to.

Answer 4

As much as you possibly can.

The more you know and understand the more effective you will be.