Building your first ASP.NET MVC5 Application in 4 simple steps

By | February 24, 2014
7 Comments

Model-View-Controller is a software pattern for achieving isolation between different application components. Its always desirable for software applications (especially web-based applications) that there must be clear separation between business logic and the user interface. We can achieve this requirement by using MVC (Model View Controller) design that makes our application more flexible to change. ASP.NET MVC is a framework based on MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern for building web applications.

You can also find more related implementation details here:

Microsoft has released the latest version of this framework as MVC5 now, with new features and enhancing existing features as well. For an overview of New Features in ASP.NET MVC5 and a good comparison with earlier versions. please Click Here. Let’s understand a bit about MVC i.e. Model, View and Controller here but in order to get understanding of pre-requisite concepts in more detail, please read through ASP.NET MVC FAQs.

  • Model:- a representation of our data structure in a data source e.g. database.
  • View:- a user interface for model that is presented to end-user.
  • Controller:- Translating input from a user to an action on model and preparing appropriate view in response.

For the purpose of implementation, I am going to use Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web. You can easily download it from Microsoft at following URL.

Simple Steps for ASP.NET MVC5 Application

We will follow below steps to build a simple ASP.NET MVC5 application:
  1. Creating MVC5 project in VS 2013
  2. Preparing a Model
  3. Add a Controller
  4. Add simple View
1. Creating MVC5 project in Visual Studio 2013
  • Open Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web and create “New Project” as “File –> New Project.
  • Choose “ASP.NET Web Application” template as shown in following figure. Name the project as “MyFirstMVC5App”, choose location and press “OK” button.
  • In next dialog, choose “MVC” as template and again press “OK” button.
  • A new ASP.NET MVC 5 project will be created as follows. You can easily find the “Controllers”, “Models” and “Views” folder in solution explorer.

2. Preparing a Model

  • In order to prepare a model, right click on “Models” folder and choose “Add”, then “Class”.
  • Name the class as “Employee.cs”.
  • As we discussed earlier that “Model” is the representation of data structure in our Data Source, so you can assume this “Employee” class represents an Employee table in our database with columns as “EmpID”, “EmpFirstName”, “EmpLastName” and so on.

Note: In order to keep this ASP.NET MVC5 Tutorial simple and straight forward, I am not going to perform any CRUD operation. We will use this Employees.cs class in later Web Development articles on this blog.

3. Add a Controller

  • To add a controller to our project, right click on “Controllers” folder, choose “Add”, then “Controller”.
  • From “Add Scaffold” dialog, choose “MVC 5 Controller – Empty” and press “Add” button as follows:
  • Name the controller as “EmployeeController” in next dialog and press “Add”. A new controller will be added to “Controllers” folder. Controller code generated will be as follows:
There are few important things need to understand here:

  1. EmployeeController inheriting from base Controller class has a method named Index(). This Index() method will be the default method called when accessing this controller as (http://localhost:xxxx/Employee/).
  2. In order to generate HTML response, above Index() method uses a view template i.e. represented in code as “return View();”
  3. As we create a controller, a new folder will be created under “Views” named as “Employee”.

4. Add a View

  • Finally for adding a view, right click on newly created “Employee” folder under views, choose “Add”, then “MVC 5 View Page (Razor)”. Specify the name for the view “Index” as follows:
  • A new file with the name “Index.cshtml” will be added under “Views->Employee” folder. I have added meaningful some text to this page as shown in below figure.
Now, we are done with creating a simple ASP.NET MVC 5 application. To run the application, click CTRL + F5. Result will be as follows:
Now change the URL in browser from above to http://localhost:11517/Employee/ and press enter, still the output remains the same.
Now it will be clear that request actually comes to controller i.e. EmployeeController in our case and controller renders a view (Index.cshtml we created under Views->Employee folder) for us in browser.
In later ASP.NET MVC tutorials, we will try to explore interaction between Model, Controller and Views in more details.

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7 thoughts on “Building your first ASP.NET MVC5 Application in 4 simple steps”

  1. Ras

    thankx alot bro.I had an interview and they asked me almost similar questions. Respect.

  2. Raj Kumar

    Kindly provide the Basic coding to send the value from View to Controller in MVC 3 or 5 using RAZOR

  3. Squirrl

    return View(new Employee(){Empid:1, EmpFirstName:”Raj”, EmpLastName:”Kumar”});

    Inside View
    @model MvcApplication,Models.Employee
    @Html.DisplayFor(model => model.EmpId) to display its content

  4. Pingback: Using WCF Data Contract Known Types by Example | WCF Tutorial

  5. Pingback: Top New Features in ASP.NET Web API 2.1 | Web Development Tutorial

  6. Shabbi

    Nice article, a good plateform to strart on.

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