In the first section of this book, we build a fully functional sample application to manage and share recipes for homebrewed beers. Chapter 1, Developing for the Mobile Web, begins with a discussion on the importance of understanding how to develop for the mobile web. You are then given a brief history of how we arrived to at the mobile web of today. The chapter ends by discussing all of the constraints we, as developers, must acknowledge if we are to successfully develop applications for the mobile web.

Chapter 2, Homebrew and You, introduces you to the domain of homebrewing and BrewHow—our homebrew recipe sharing application. From our understanding of this domain we build the requirements for our application and then examine how ASP.NET MVC 4 and its new features will help us develop it. We conclude the chapter by setting up our environment to launch our mobile emulator to design and test our application.

Chapter 3, Introducing ASP.NET MVC 4, introduces the MVC pattern. We then discuss how it is implemented within ASP.NET MVC 4 as we begin to build our application. By the end of this chapter the initial shell of our application will be complete and running inside our desktop and mobile browsers.

Chapter 4, Modeling BrewHow in EF5, walks us through creating a data model for BrewHow. We begin by discussing the new features and improvements of Entity framework and create a data model and database for our domain using the code-first model in EF. The model and database are continually refined through the use of migrations until the needs of our application are met and our application is consuming data from LocalDB.

Chapter 5, The BrewHow Domain and Domain-driven Design, introduces us to the tenets of DDD. We apply these tenets to BrewHow by creating repositories, view models, and domain entities to enforce the boundaries between persistence, logic, and display.

Chapter 6, Writing Maintainable Code, begins with a discussion on the SOLID principles of object-oriented design; principles that serve to facilitate the writing of maintainable code. We then review the topics of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control as tools to help us SOLIDify the BrewHow codebase. This chapter ends by applying these principles and tools to the codebase leveraging the extension points provided to us by ASP.NET MVC 4.

Chapter 7, Separating Functionality Using Routes and Areas, provides a detailed discussion on this key piece of technology in ASP.NET MVC 4. We examine how, by leveraging routing and areas, we can create meaningful SEO-friendly URLs and separate the functionality of BrewHow into discrete units of work for the content contained within BrewHow. We then exercise our knowledge by adding support for user reviews.

Chapter 8, Validating User Input, looks at the server-side support for data validation contained within the .NET Framework's System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. The data model and view models are modified to support the use of these attributes so we can validate input on the client side and again once the data has made it to the server. We also explore how these technologies help protect BrewHow from common web attacks such as CSRF and XSS.

Chapter 9, Identifying and Authorizing Users, introduces the new membership functionality available in ASP.NET MVC 4. BrewHow is modified to support user authentication using the new membership functionality and we then modify the application to allow authentication using a Google login. We end the chapter by tying together the BrewHow data model with the membership data model so we can associate recipes and reviews with the users that created them.

Our application is now functionally complete and has met all of the requirements set forth in Chapter 2, Homebrew and You. In the second section of the book we take a look at a few advanced features provided by ASP.NET MVC 4. Chapter 10, Asynchronous Programming and Bundles, explores how we can design the server-side portion of our application to get information to our users more efficiently and with less wait time—something critical for mobile applications. To accomplish this, we begin by examining and then implementing support for asynchronous actions. We then examine the support of minification provided to us in the form of bundles.

Chapter 11, Coding for the Real-Time Web, investigates how we can use always-on connectivity to provide the illusion of a desktop application within BrewHow. We then leverage SignalR to simulate push notifications from the server to BrewHow.

With our application fully optimized to deliver content to mobile devices, we can now begin the third part of the book. Chapter 12, Designing Your App for Mobile Devices, discusses how we can use the next-generation of web standards, HTML5 and CSS3, to create responsive markup to present our content to users in a manner best fitting the device on which they are viewing it.

Chapter 13, Extending Support for the Mobile Web, extends the concept of mobile design to our servers as we explore the mobile view support built into ASP.NET MVC 4. We then extend this concept to target specific mobile devices using the new support for display modes.

Chapter 14, Improving the User Experience with jQuery Mobile, shows how BrewHow can be converted to a mobile web application that looks and feels as if it were native to the device. We look at some of the controls provided by jQuery Mobile and apply them within the context of everything we have learned to build a fully polished and functional mobile application.

Chapter 15, Reader Challenges, presents how BrewHow could be extended to be an even richer experience for the user. We discuss how full-text search technology could be integrated into BrewHow, how we might provide support for social networking, and how we might even extend BrewHow into a truly native mobile application. The readers are then encouraged to undertake these tasks themselves.

To build the sample application within this book you will need a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Web 2012. To view the sample application you will need a web browser capable of supporting HTML5 and CSS3. The sample application in this book was tested using the current version of Google Chrome and Opera Mobile Emulator running on Windows 8.

This book is for any individual wishing to learn ASP.NET MVC 4 and its role in developing applications that target the mobile web. The material in this book assumes the reader has familiarity with the .NET framework and exposure to C#. If you are new to ASP.NET MVC and want a good solid introduction, if you want to learn what's new in ASP.NET MVC 4, or if you want to learn how you can modify your web applications to support multiple devices this book is for you.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " In prior versions of MVC, all of the application bootstrap code was located in the Global.asax code-behind".

A block of code is set as follows:

.white-go
{
    width:31px;
    background:url('img-sprite.png') 0 0;
}

.orange-go
{
    width: 31px;
    background:url('img-sprite.png') -32px 0;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

public interface IBrewHowContext
{
  IDbSet<Models.Recipe> Recipes { get; set; }
  IDbSet<Models.Review> Reviews { get; set; }
  IDbSet<Models.Style> Styles { get; set; }

IDbSet<Models.UserProfile> UserProfiles { get; set; }

  int SaveChanges();
}

public class BrewHowContext : DbContext, IBrewHowContext
{
  public IDbSet<Models.Recipe> Recipes { get; set; }
  public IDbSet<Models.Review> Reviews { get; set; }
  public IDbSet<Models.Style> Styles { get; set; }
  public IDbSet<Models.UserProfile> UserProfiles { get; set; }
  public BrewHowContext()
    : base("DefaultConnection")
  {
  }
  /* ... */
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application icon and provide a name and location for the new project in the Name and Location text boxes respectively".

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.