ASP.NET MVC how to understand related technologies, javascript, html, css

Question

I need advice. I can understand asp.net mvc/c#, but I feel uncomfortable when I am working with html-css, javascript, jQuery. I can not understand how to mix It all. Can you give some good advice? possible good articles, examples.

Answer 1

Regarding how to mix it all you could say that html and css is only connected to your views and that javascript/jQuery could be connected to both your views and your controllers (if you use AJAX).

W3schools.com has nice html and css intros:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp

Answer 2

Only one way - practice. Practice with books and with mentor is much better.

Answer 3

I would recommend you starting with the jquery documentation which contains many useful tutorials and examples. If you are saying that you are comfortable with ASP.NET MVC then you already know the markup that is being generated by the different helpers and so applying jquery to them unobtrusively in a separate javascript file is really simple and the same as if you were using some other server side framework. Just try to make an abstraction of the server side framework when working with jquery. Think of it in terms of static HTML markup that you are applying some dynamic actions to.

The following two topics are really important to learn as you will probably be using them most during application development:

• DOM manipulation
• AJAX

There have been some efforts from the part of Microsoft to abstract javascript into some HTML helpers (known as the MicrosoftAjax framework) so that the developer shouldn't need to know javascript or jquery in order to use them and IMHO this is a disaster. It is leading to mixing markup and javascript and the developer loosing track of what is happening with his application and not knowing why it doesn't work, simply because he learned some leaky abstractions without understanding the fundamental concepts. So if I had an advice to give you is to download FireBug and start practicing jquery with some simple HTML markup.

By the way jsfiddle.net is a great site allowing you to very quickly start creating mockups with jquery, HTML and CSS.

Answer 4

practice and work more with the technologies, if you have gotten grasp on asp.net/c#/mvc you should have no problem with the other things as well; start reading blogs and books too