Most developers who have worked in MVC are probably used to the normal structure of projects.  Controllers go in the Controllers folder, Models in the Models folder, Views in the Views folder.  And most developers who have worked in MVC long enough, also are probably used to the annoyance of having to hunt through the Solution Explorer to find all the corresponding models for the controller, the views you are working on, and scrolling up and down on large projects.  This article shows you how you can take back control of your project structure!

In the previous article, we set up a base, empty Kentico MVC site, hotfixed it, and installed various tools that we will be using to build the actual website. In this article, we will finish configuring the MVC Site, and add in base elements that all MVC websites have.  This article documents the open source Kentico 12 Baseline repository.

Many may be wondering what I have been up to the past couple months, my blog posts have dried up and the elusive Part 2 of the Build a Kentico site in 24 hours has yet to appear.  Sadly, this is not Part 2 of that blog series, but I do want to give an update on what is all been happening and what activity has occurred.

Building Sites in MVC can be a daunting task.  Many expect it to take double or more time than a normal portal engine site, however with new tools and helpful systems, I plan on showing you how you can build a simple MVC site, using Kentico, in under 24 hours.

This first part covers the first 4 hours of the build: Getting your environment set up, your Kentico site installed, and your tools installed and configured.

What, you thought I was done with Dynamic Routing?  No way!  My previous Dynamic Routing system was only a stop gap, allowing only NodeAliasPath routing, and a rather clunky redirection system.  After 80+ hours of work (and 20 some from fellow Kentico enthusiast Sean G. Wright), we present to you the fully integrated and optimized Dynamic Routing plugin!

Caching is a big part of website performance.  In Kentico Portal Engine, we took caching for granted, and adding the Cache Keys, Durations, and Dependencies were a breaze.

Now we are in MVC, and Caching is a little less intuitive.  This article discusses a new set of tools I created for you to make Caching in Kentico MVC smooth.

THIS POST IS OUDATED, PLEASE SEE NOVEMBER 2019

MVC Routing operates on the basis that a request is handled by Controllers and Actions in predefined routes. Dynamic Routing is where a request maps to a Page (TreeNode), and that Page's settings (Template, Page Type) determines how the request should be handled (which Controller/Action/View). In Portal Engine, the Url matched the NodeAliasPath or Url Aliases of a page, and the Page's Template then determined how it was handled. In this article we will outline how to restore the Portal Engine request handling now that the Kentico 12Service Pack is out.

Things have been moving along in the Kentico MVC world.  As an MVP I was priveledged to get a preview of the upcoming Service Pack and we have the green light to share that with you.  I also have worked on another improvement to restore some of the Kentico Portal Engine functionality that I'll go into depth explaining.

The transition from Portal Engine to MVC can be challenging for many who are new to MVC.  Many of the features we were accustomed to having through webparts now require coding to enable or add them in.  Kentico provided the Dancing Goat site in MVC to showcase many of their features, but the down side is there’s too much in it, it’s very hard to “strip” out the Dancing Goat and preserve the Kentico features so you can start a new project.

Sadly the “Blank MVC Site” goes to the other extreme, it’s truly Blank.  There’s nothing in it, no Authentication Own setup, no routes or helpers, no 404s handlers, no bundles, no nothing.  Leaving a first-time developer going through a lot of documentation to get things started.

Portal Method and MVC can be pretty differnet animals.  In this article I'll show you how make your MVC site find pages based on their NodeAliasPath or Url Alias, and render them how you wish!