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.

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.

The future is coming, and those who don't adapt often are left in the dust.  Being future-minded in your development of websites can mean the difference between being able to leverage new technologies and trends, or being faced with a total rebuild, which no one wants.
In this article, I’m going to go over some great principles for structuring your content and relationships to make sure it's ready for whatever gets thrown at it.
 

There comes a point in almost every website that you have some form of a dynamic page that changes based on what information is passed to it.  Whether that’s as simple as the Search Page sending the search text to it, or something more complex like a shopping cart storing the current cart’s content and making it available from page to page.  Passing parameters around is a big part of your web sites and web systems.

In any Site or Entity, there are Many-to-One or Many-to-Many relationships.  Whether it be something as simple as “Multiple Banners to display on this page” to the more complex relationships that are needed to do custom ups (such as “Multiple states this dealer serves”).  The tricky part is, there are multiple ways to handle multiple relationships in Kentico, each with pros and cons.  By the end of this article however, you should be able to know which is the best thing for the situation!