Introduction
I wrote this article because there is little information about MVC for VB.NET developers. Most of the MVC examples and videos from the ASP.NET website are C# centric. I encourage you to watch the videos here http://www.asp.net/mvc/ once you see this working in VB the C# syntax will be easier to follow.
Background
Microsoft MVC is really cool! MVC is short for Model-View-Controller a modern way to organize data centric projects that makes a lot of sense for web development. I first came across MVC development when learning Ruby on Rails (ROR). I felt it was a fast and flexible way to quickly model and build applications, it just seemed to fit my style. I was quite elated to see MVC in Microsoft technology because I develop using Microsoft technology every day. To be frank; the model in Ruby on Rails is fastly superior to the current MVC 2 implementation in terms of how much code is generated for you. In ROR the scaffold mechanism can build an entire MVC application from a database model in just a few commands typed from the dark place. At this point Microsoft MVC takes a little more work, but it sure is fun!
What are the Model View and Controller?
Model - This is your database design schema as you might draw it up in a database diagraming tool. In this article I use the tools built into Visual Studio 2008 to build the database. To connect to the database I use LINQ to SQL.
View - These are the web pages, the front end code that shows the data from the database it presents forms for editing, and tables/grids for data. You can quickly generate views for the primary CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete).
Controller - The controller is where all the programming takes place.
About LINQ to SQL (LINK TO SEQUEL)
I choose LINQ to SQL because it brings the database selection logic to the programming language level and does all the dirty work to translate that code into database level code. Once you build your model you work with tables as objects. All the basic CRUD operations are readily available. It is a very slick abstraction.
Downloading the MVC Framework
You need to download the MVC framework from Microsoft.
Building your First MVC Application