Summary

Get any two developers together and they'll probably have a different opinion on how real-world applications should be built. The NuGet Gallery is no exception. Even the developers who work on the gallery have different opinions.

The NuGet Galley is just one example of a real-world application out of the infinite possibilities that such applications could take. It's not intended to be a reference application or an example of “This is the one true way to build an ASP.NET MVC application.”

Its only purpose was to meet the need for a gallery to host NuGet packages. And so far, it's doing that very well, though there are a few issues here and there.

However, there's one aspect of building this gallery that I think is universally applicable to developers. The NuGet team was able to build the gallery so quickly and with such high quality because we were able to leverage so many useful and well written community-built packages. Leveraging existing packages will help you build better software faster, so it's worth taking time to look through the NuGet Gallery. There are many great packages beyond the ones used by this code.

If you would like to get your hands dirty working on a real-world ASP.NET MVC application, why don't you consider helping out? It's an open source project and the NuGet team welcomes contributors. Just take a look at our issues list, https://github.com/nuget/nugetgallery/issues, or meet us in our JabbR chat room, http://jabbr.net/#/rooms/nuget.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 4

Published by

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Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-34846-8

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To my wife, Rachel, my daughters, Rosemary, Esther, and Ellie, and to you for reading this book. Enjoy!

—Jon Galloway

My wife, Akumi, deserves to have her name on the cover as much as I do, for all her support made this possible. And thanks to Cody for his infectious happiness.

—Phil Haack

To Potten on Potomac.

—K. Scott Allen

About the Authors

Jon Galloway works at Microsoft as a Windows Azure Technical Evangelist focused on the ASP.NET platform. He wrote the MVC Music Store tutorial, helped organize mvcConf and aspConf (free online conferences for the ASP.NET community), and speaks at conferences and Web Camps worldwide. He also has worked in a wide range of web development shops, from scrappy startups to large financial companies. He's part of the Herding Code podcast (http://herdingcode.com), blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway, and twitters as @jongalloway. He lives in San Diego with his wife, three daughters, and a bunch of avocado trees.

Phil Haack works at GitHub, striving to make Git and GitHub better for developers on Windows. Prior to joining GitHub, Phil was a Senior Program Manager with the ASP.NET team whose areas of responsibility included ASP.NET MVC and NuGet. As a code junkie, Phil loves to craft software. Not only does he enjoy writing software, he enjoys writing about software and software management on his blog, http://haacked.com/.

Brad Wilson works for Microsoft as a Senior Software Developer on the Azure Application Platform and Tools team on the ASP.NET MVC and Web API projects. Prior to ASP.NET, Brad also worked on the CodePlex and the Patterns and Practices teams at Microsoft, and has acted as a developer, consultant, architect, team lead, and CTO at various software companies for nearly 20 years. He's the co-author of the xUnit.net open source developer testing framework, maintains a blog focused primarily on ASP.NET topics at http://bradwilson.typepad.com/, and tweets as @bradwilson. Brad lives in beautiful Redmond, Washington.

K. Scott Allen is the founder of OdeToCode LLC and a software consultant. Scott has 20 years of commercial software development experience across a wide range of technologies. He has delivered software products for embedded devices, Windows desktop, web, and mobile platforms. He has developed web services for Fortune 50 companies and firmware for startups. Scott is also a speaker at international conferences and delivers classroom training and mentoring to companies around the world.

About the Technical Editor

Eilon Lipton joined the ASP.NET team as a developer at Microsoft in 2002. On this team, he has worked on areas ranging from data source controls to localization to the UpdatePanel control. That team is now part of the Azure Application Platform Team, where Eilon is the principal development manager for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and Entity Framework. Eilon is also a speaker on a variety of ASP.NET-related topics at conferences worldwide. He graduated from Boston University with a dual degree in Math and Computer Science. In his spare time Eilon spends time in his garage workshop building what he considers to be well-designed furniture. If you know anyone who needs a coffee table that's three feet tall and has a slight slope to it, send him an e-mail.

Credits

Acknowledgments

Thanks to family and friends who graciously acted as if “Jon without sleep” is someone you'd want to spend time with. Thanks to the whole ASP.NET team for making work fun since 2002, and especially to Brad Wilson and Phil Haack for answering tons of random questions. Thanks to Warren G. Harding for normalcy. Thanks to Philippians 4:4–9 for continually reminding me which way is up.

— Jon Galloway

Thanks go to my lovely wife, Akumi, for her support, which went above and beyond all expectations and made this possible. I'd like to also give a shout out to my son, Cody, for his sage advice, delivered as only a two-year-old can deliver it. I'm sure he'll be embarrassed 10 years from now that I used such an anachronism (“shout out”) in my acknowledgment to him. Thanks go to my daughter, Mia, as her smile lights up the room like unicorns.

— Phil Haack