A few days ago, Scott Guthrie posted an e-book tutorial for the new ASP.NET MVC framework that's been in beta for awhile.

Scott is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, and heads up the teams for ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS, and so forth. He's also been working pretty closely with ASP.NET MVC, so I was really interested in what he did with this tutorial. While there are a number of how-to videos out there on ASP.NET MVC, the end-to-end (full application) tutorials are few and far between, so I was really excited to see this posted.

The tutorial itself shows you how to create the aptly named "NerdDinner" application, whose purpose is to enable themed social gatherings. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet myself, but I've liked the parts that I've done a lot. Scott does a good job walking you through the application and explaining why he's doing what he's doing. This is a good way to have ASP.NET MVC laid out for you in a logical way that shows the importance of the features it gives you. Scott starts by building the data model, and then moves right on to the controllers and the views. A real gem here, though, is his section on CRUD, which really highlights some of the cool ways ASP.NET will save you a little time now, and a lot of time later. Check it out.

As a slight aside, I also really appreciate the way the book shows screenshots and textual (ie. copy-and-pastable) code with Visual Studio syntax highlighting. This book is a model of how I want my own tutorials to look. For example, see how he highlights each click and gives you full code below? I admire his ability to do that so succintly.

This e-book is actually the first chapter of an ASP.NET MVC book that Scott has been working on alongside Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery. The publisher agreed to release the first chapter for free in exchange for Scott writing this chapter for free. Go figure. If you're interested in the full book, it is already listed on Amazon for pre-order.

Links

You can download the full e-book tutorial here as a 14mb PDF. The source code and unit tests are also provided. You can take a look at the pre-production Amazon listing for the book, and if you want to learn more about ASP.NET MVC (including video tutorials), check out the ASP.NET MVC site.