» » Overview of Pluralsight course "A Beginner's Guide to the Microsoft Web Platform"

Overview of Pluralsight course "A Beginner's Guide to the Microsoft Web Platform"

This video course by Michael Palermo is useful for beginners to ASP.NET and ASP.NET developers who are yet to try MVC & WebPages. The seasoned presenter explains the difference between Web Forms, MVC and WebPages. He demonstrates how to create a new site, a new page, a simple input form, a data-driven list with each of the models.

Some notes from the video -
- A modern definition of ASP.NET – "Microsoft’s family of technologies to enable web development"; includes Web Forms, MVC, Web Page models
- The Web Page model is a page-centric execution model, similar to PHP. Markup and code are both contained in the page itself, with helpers being leveraged to keep the code succinct.
- If you have VS 2010 SP1, you should be able to see MVC3 options
- A WebPage can be built with Web Matrix or VS 2010
- Site built with WebMatrix can be opened through VS
- WebPage has the extension .cshtml. Works even without extension in the URL.
- CASE methodology – Copy Always Steal Everything. Bazinga!

I found that the presenter speaks slower than most other Pluralsight instructors and this is actually good as non-native English speakers can follow it more easily.

Trivia: For fun, I increased the Playback speed  in the Windows Media Player (this option is available when you open the site in Internet Explorer) and was able to complete watching the video in slightly lesser time than the actual duration of 1 hour 47 minutes.

I like the fact the Pluralsight specifies the overall duration as well as duration of individual sections of a course as it helps in planning how you would want to watch a long course.