Suggest a weekend learning track for MVC3 for someone familiar ASP.NET web forms development

Question

I have a "green field" project I'll be starting monday, and it's an intranet business application that wants to do all the typical stuff like workflow, alerts. The Model is done with EF and has all the core entities that a 50 person company would be expected to have plus a model of business specific accounting procedures - every entity corresponds to a noun in the employees' nomenclature.

I spent a good deal of spare time in the past few months learning sharepoint 2010 and it definately has facilities for everything this project wants to be (think enthusiastic business owner who recently woke up to the possibilities of life beyond excel sheets). I may not have the opportunity to get up on the sharepoint curve quickly enough and this means writing it from scratch.

The main things I need to deal with are: - grid style data forms - active directory based authentication - email integrated alerts and event driven workflow - professional appearance similar to default sharepoint 2010 theme

I know how I'd do it with web forms. It would not be trivial by any means - Providers, .ASCX Controls, Validators, Masterpages, Themes, Skins, tied together with a project specific class library to support cross-cutting issues. I have this architecture in my mind and it's worked for me on other projects - I can predict to myself the success and schedule, which makes my stress level manageable.

That said, I get the distinct imppression from the "blog-o-sphere" that I'd be doing myself a disservice if I didn't at least try to use MVC for this.

I started researching and found the Documentation Resources for ASP.NET MVC 3 and, well, I just don't know where to begin.

I have this weekend to decide if I can do it because Monday I've gotta go in with a game plan.

If, from my description, someone could recommend a tutorial and/or a clean open source example, I'd be very thankful.

Answer 1

For me, a real world sample is always the most useful where to start :

http://www.asp.net/entity-framework/tutorials/creating-an-entity-framework-data-model-for-an-asp-net-mvc-application

There is a real world sample there called The Contoso University Web Application

The following conference session videos are great the start with also :

MVC 3 – 101 by Scott Hanselman : http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/DevDays/DevDays-2011-Netherlands/Devdays002

ASP.NET MVC 3 @:The Time is Now by Phil Haack : http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/FRM03

ASP.NET + Packaging + Open Source = Crazy Delicious by Scott Hanselman : http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC10/FT01

And there are so many out there on Channel9

Answer 2

I suggest you get this book (e-book version). It contains a real walk through example on the first chapter that you can follow, and then as you move along, the author also tells you why you do certain things the way the are. I'm sure with your experience (as you describe) with webforms, this book should be sufficient for you to make a decision over the weekend.

Just out of curiosity though (in a pragmatic point of view), if you believe you can do this easily using webforms, why the trouble learning MVC over the weekend? Wouldn't you be disservicing yourself then :)?