Red Gate Software has launched Simply Web Dev, a new educational curated guide that enables developers to learn ASP.NET MVC. The guide mainly provides links to external resources related to ASP.NET MVC such as Areas, Routing, Controllers and Actions, Controller Extensibility, Filters, Views, Model Template, Binding and Validation.
InfoQ talked to Chris Massey, Product Marketing Specialist, Red Gate Software to know more about Simply Web Dev portal.
InfoQ: Can you share with us the meaning of curated guides?
Curated guides are compilations of some of the best technical content available on the web today, brought together and curated by experienced ASP.NET developers, and structured to help developers who are new to ASP.NET MVC find the most informative content available.In short, the guides are designed to help developers who are learning about ASP.NET MVC to benefit from the experience and insight of more experience web developers, and help them to only read what they need to as they learn about the technology.
InfoQ: Can you tell us the necessity for the creation of Simply Web Dev portal?
If you're trying to learn about ASP.NET MVC, there is a HUGE amount of content already available online that you have to navigate through in order to find what you need. A lot of this content repeats itself, the quality varies, and unless you are already an experience web developer, it can be hard to find really useful content.We think that it would be very useful for new web developers, and web developers who are new to ASP.NET, to be able to quickly find some of the best content available to help them understand the technology, and to be confident in the quality of what they're reading.
InfoQ: What inspired Red Gate to create Simply Web Dev?
We [Simple-Talk] have recently been looking at ways in which we can support the web development community. Naturally, with our author network, we could commission more articles and blog posts to that fit with what we know our web developers are looking for, but when we started to look at the content that was already available, we had another idea.We quickly realised that there is a huge body of content already published and that, rather than just adding to that, we could help web developers by giving them another way to find the best content - human experts, and the wisdom of the crowd. Don't get me wrong, Google is very good at finding information but, at the moment, having a human expert show you what you should be reading is still a better process.
InfoQ: Do you have any plans to create similar portals for ASP.NET, LINQ, Visual Studio 2012?
Absolutely. We definitely plan to expand our coverage and, at the moment, no topic is off-limits. However, our first priority is to help web developers better understand the technologies they're working with, so we probably won't start curating detailed guides to tooling for a few months, unless someone wants to email us and convince us otherwise.
InfoQ: How often you plan to update Simply Web Dev?
We are aiming to update Simply Web Dev every week with more curated content. To start with, we're working hard to complete our coverage of ASP.NET MVC, and use that as an alpha prototype to help us learn more about what kind of content web developers are looking for, and how we can improve the experience and functionality of our curated resources.As we become more confident about how best we can support the community, we'll start to speed up and publish more guides.
InfoQ: Do you think Simply Web Dev will be useful for Students?
Definitely. If you're a student who is new to web development, or just new to ASP.NET technologies, the benefit of having a domain expert explain what you should be reading to deepen your understanding, and why you should be reading it, is huge.
We want to help anyone who is learning about web development to understand the technology they're working with as quickly and smoothly as possible, and with a minimum of searching, and we think that students will find that experience particularly helpful.
