Tutorial: Develop an MVC application

I'm making this course to add my voice to the many about using ASP.NET. In particular, I'll focus on how to get a "boring" job working on legacy code.

These jobs are at every kind of company — small, medium, and large. They aren't startups, but rather cash-flow positive companies which use safe and battle-tested Microsoft technologies. Think banks, insurance (life, health, etc.), government, hospitals, logistics, and tons of small, no-name companies.

These places typically don't ask data structure and algorithm questions. Hour-long tech conversations are common, as are take-homes.

All of them, more than likely, have MVC apps. These apps need to be supported and maintained. Bugs need fixed and features need to be added.

React and Blazor didn't get me my jobs. Every take-home I've received was in MVC. This framework is ubiquitous in the corporate world, yet few learners focus on it because it isn't new. The sheer amount of business applications out there built in MVC will keep .NET developers in-demand for decades to come.

The Course Project

Here's a link to the web app we will build together: dotnetshops.fyi. It is a fairly basic example of CRUD. It is good to get the basic pattern ingrained in your brain. We'll be using MVC and the latest .NET. Uniquely, we'll be using ADO.NET and raw SQL to access the database. A lot of legacy code utilizes queries and stored procedures. I think it's also enormously beneficial to understand this way of accessing the database, in order to better understand tools like Entity Framework. And SQL is just incredibly important and often overlooked by learners, in my opinion. You are 100% guaranteed to work with it in an ASP.NET job.

Well, I hope I've got you interested in joining me for this course. I'll be posting a couple lessons each week, come along for a few months as I create a course with succinct lessons that should help you prepare for a .NET developer job at a "boring" company.

Prerequisites

This is a beginner course, but not for absolute beginners. You should either have been coding in some language for about 6 months and ready to try transferring your skills to C#, .NET, and MVC, or have already focused on learning the basics of C# specifically.

Some basic knowledge of SQL and databases are nice to have too. But, this course could also serve as a general introduction to those things as well.