MVC pattern differences

Question

I just need a few links to articles I can read up on or some basic explanations regarding the different patterns used in MVC (C#).

At present I tend to build my web apps

Answer 1

When I started reading your post I was thinking that maybe what you are looking for is an understanding of SOLID principles. And then you end by mentioning interfaces and service layers. Interesting.

There are plenty of articles celebrating the holy grail of SOLID and DRY (Many without understanding what DRY advocates are really proposing). But the general idea in the .NET world, is NOT to go to the autogenerated Page_Load in an aspx and start typing away all willy nilly until a page does what it is supposed to do. MVC to the rescue.

You say you have a model for each view. I would call that sound. Even if two models are identical, they are only equal, not the same. For example: A NewsItem is not an EventItem. If you want to expand on one, it should not effect the other.

Then you continue with saying you are producing your models in the view model itself. That sounds backwards. But you say you do so in order to keep your controller clean. Good! What is missing in your mindset, is services.

What you want to do is to move all code that actually perform any kind of work into services. A service can be based on an aspect, or on a feature or why not a control. Looking at one web project now, I see: VisitorService, NewsfeedService, CalendarService, CachingService, MainMenuService, HeaderService, FooterService etc etc ad infinitum.

In this scenario, the controller is only responsible for asking a service (or services), that performs some work, for a model. And then forward that model to a view.

Once you got 'business logic' into services you can easily apply IoC (Inversion of Control) to your projects if that makes you happy. I have not cast my vote on IoC yet. I have the eerie the benefits is not as great as advertized, and you can do without the code bloat for sure. But IoC do ask of you to think before you code.

For a very easy going tutorial on IoC, I recommend Ninject. Not only does it feature Ninjas, but samurais, swords and shuriken as well. That's a lot cooler than cars and animals.

https://github.com/ninject/ninject/wiki/Dependency-Injection-By-Hand