Preface of the Book
This book will take you on a journey through using Razor View Engine in MVC applications. In the very beginning of the book, we will understand why this technology is useful by comparing with other view engines and as you progress you will learn inline codes, block codes, mixed codes, conditional and repetitive statements, layouts and nested layouts, directives, scaffolding, models, directives, helpers with extension and declarative, partial views, and much more about Razor with some really unique examples.
You will find this book a vital companion as you progress through your reading. So let this Razor journey begin!
What this book covers
Creating the project (Should know) - helps you learn how to get a project ready to start writing Razor syntaxes.
Fundamental Razor syntaxes (Must know) - shows you the syntactic differences between Razor and ASPX View Engines. You will also learn about inline code expressions, code block expressions, mixed code expressions, conditional statements, loops, comments, text tag, language parser, and much more.
Razor layout pages (Become an expert) - helps you learn about all the concepts of layout pages, nested layout pages, RenderBody, RenderSection, and much more in detail.
Models in Razor (Must know) - helps you learn the concept of models, scaffolding views, directives, and much more.
Razor Helpers (Must know) - talks about helpers with extension methods, declarative syntax, and standard helpers.
Partial Views (Should know) - explores Partial Views including Partial helpers, RenderPartial helper, Action helpers, RenderAction helpers, and much more.
Who this book is for
This book is for any developer who uses .NET/MVC3/MVC4/WebMatrix and would benefit from going to the new syntax. Being a developer, I understand all the pain we get in web applications. We always look for alternatives that can make our coding life easier and the people at Microsoft are working hard to make it possible. If you are also looking for alternatives, simply start learning Razor.
How I got this opportunity and how I screwed-up?
It was 27th Nov 2012 when I reached college where I teach, I checked my emails and I found an email in Spam/Junk folder, here is the email message:
Hi Abhimanyu,
I am P. Jain, an Author Relations Executive with Packt Publishing, an International IT publishing company.
We have a new book project, Razor View Engine How-To and we are looking for skilled authors with the right expertise. When I came across your blog and activities you are doing, I thought it would be great to have you author this book. Your expertise in the subject is really impressive and having you as our author would be a pleasure.
Can we discuss this further?
Do you know before that day I had a habit to select all Spam/Junk emails to delete, I hardly read any junk email. It was God's grace, I checked that email and realized it as a spam at very first instance but when I checked sender's information I found it a real and that's how I got this opportunity.
On 07th Jan 2013, the outline of the book has been finalized and then I signed the contract. After the contract I started working on the outline/chapters. After the drafting processes and technical reviews book uploaded to printers.
All I want to say is, “I am just loving it (Author tag) and it's been a great experience and I hope it never ends."
I wrote the word ‘Author' for the first time a few days back on my Twitter profile and in my Email Signature. I experienced the same internal struggle when I first used the word ‘Microsoft MVP' to describe myself a year ago. I felt like a little boy trying to walk in mom's high heels.
When I started blogging back in 2009, I mainly blog it for myself because I'm sort of forgetful guy. I remember when I finished my blog series on LINQ I consolidated all blogs to make a free e-Book with title ‘Beginning LINQ'. I published that free e-Book I looked over at my hobby and said “I just wrote a book”, you know it was crazy, I wasn't the author type. Even today, when I float in my city or outside people takes me as a student, and I like that.
But the truth is - I am an author whether I feel like one or not.
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this book to my family, PACKT Team, India MVP Community and to you for reading this book. Also my friends Vikash, Deepak, Naveen and Ravi who give me tremendous support time to time.