ASP.NET MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs, and other Assorted Training Materials
I've answered the "Where can I learn about MVC 3" question enough that it's time for a blog post.
Tutorials
You can find a lot of good MVC training resources listed at http://www.asp.net/mvc, including:
Scott Hanselman's Getting Started With MVC tutorial is a great place to start if you're looking for a beginner level introduction. It's a very introductory level sample covering MVC 3, Nuget, and EF Code First, and the code is available in both C# and VB.NET. I'm guessing this is something that a beginner could complete in a few hours.
I've previously blogged about MVC Music Store. In addition to the mechanics of MVC 3 / NuGet / Razor views and layouts / EF Code First, it covers some slightly more advanced features, such as authentication, administration, and AJAX. It's available online and in downloadable source + 150pg PDF eBook at http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com. The goal is to cover an end-to-end app building scenario - it's not p&p style code, but it goes a little beyond Hello World. I've worked with developers who had web development experience but were new to ASP.NET MVC who completed this in a day of focused effort.
Videos
My top two recommendations here are the free Pluralsight series and the mvcConf session videos on Channel 9.
Pluralsight - Right now there’s a fantastic MVC 3 training series from Pluralsight - presented by K. Scott Allen - which is free for a limited time. This covers some of the more advanced features of MVC 3 with downloadable code samples. Don't miss this!
mvcConf - There are also 27 high quality videos from the recent mvcConf virtual ASP.NET conference, including a keynote by Scott Guthrie and presentations by MVC product team members. There's a wide variety of content there, from high level overviews and introductions all the way to Brad Wilson's Advanced MVC 3 talk.
Labs
The Web Camps Training Kits include a lot of hands on labs which build on the MVC Music Store tutorial with some intermediate to advanced concepts, like Unit Testing and Dependency Injection.
Note: The Web Camps Training Kits also include some fantastic labs for IE9 & HTML 5, OData, jQuery, WebApps, and WebMatrix as well as ASP.NET MVC 3.
What's in MVC 3
Phil and I put some extra effort into the MVC 3 release content to make sure you wouldn't have to outdated scour blog posts to find out what's going on. I've been converting the release notes to HTML (and if you've converted long Word docs to HTML before, you know how much I must love you to have volunteered to do that) for all the Beta / RC / RTM releases of MVC 3, and we've compiled and updated top links which are posted at http://asp.net/mvc/mvc3. I got the /mvc/mvc3 page going because having to datamine obsolete blog posts was annoying to me, and I figured I wasn't alone there.
The documentation team worked really hard on an MVC 3 overview which features top links to relavent blog posts, available here: http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3#overview
MVC Content Map
The MSDN Content Map for ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a lot of great links to a variety of content sources, including tutorials, blog posts, etc.
Application Building Videos
A lot of training videos focus on features, and that's often a great help. However, I find that presentations which build a working sample while you watch are indispensible for seeing the bigger context, understanding why features are important, and seeing how the different parts fit together.
I really like Scott Hanselman's PDC 2010 session, PDC10: Building a Blog with Microsoft "Unnamed Package of Web Love". Scott showed off MVC 3 features, but also showed how fundamentally MVC development - and all .NET development, really - is changed by using NuGet. It's great stuff.
If you don't mind a more informal tone, you might like The Full Stack series on Channel 9. It's a series that Jesse Liberty and I are working on, and we're aiming to go beyond the product-centric approach to show how to integrate multiple pieces in the dev stack. We're using ASP.NET MVC 3, NuGet, EF Code First, WCF Data Services / OData, and Windows Phone 7. As part of hooking these things together, we're trying to document things that don't show up in product level documentation.
Recommendations?
Please recommend any others you think are worthwhile in the comments!