Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new project. Select ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application from the Web templates as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2.1. Figure 1, New Project.

Next you need to select the Empty template, and select the Razor view engine.

Figure 2.2. Figure 2, Select Empty Template.

You will need to create a few files. Right click the Controllers folder in Solution Explorer and choose Add | Controller ... Name this controller HomeController and choose the Empty controller template. See Figure 3.

Figure 2.3. Figure 3, Creating the HomeController.

Next right click on the Views folder, and create a folder named Home and then right click on that folder and choose Add | View ... Name the view Index and use the Razor template. You can leave everything else on the dialog as is, and click the Add button.

After you've completed this, you will be left with Solution Explorer looking like Figure 4.

Figure 2.4. Figure 4, Stage 1 files created.

Open the HomeController.cs file and make its contents look like Listing 1 now.

Listing 1, HomeController.cs

using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace CouchbaseTutorial.Controllers
{
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// GET: /Home
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            ViewData["Message"] = "I don't know you.";

            return View();
        }

    }
}

Then edit the Index.cshtml view file and set the contents to be that of Listing 2.

Listing 2, Index.cshtml

@using CouchbaseTutorial.Models;

@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Home";
}

<h2>Home</h2>

<p>@ViewData["Message"]</p>

In the next Stage, you will be downloading and configuring the Enyim Memcache and Couchbase client library. We will refer to this as the client library or simply as the client. The driver allows any .NET object to be saved into Couchbase as long as that object is annotated with Serializable. So, we'll make a simple data model object that we'll use to store user information into the database with. See Listing 3. Right click on the Models folder and add a new class.

Listing 3, User.cs

using System;

namespace CouchbaseTutorial.Models
{
    [Serializable]
    public class User
    {
        public Guid UserId { get; set; }
        public String UserName { get; set; }
        public String Password { get; set; }
        public String FullName { get; set; }
    }
}

There's nothing fancy about this, just a few auto properties to hold the data in, and the very important Serializable attribute. Without this attribute, the client will not be able to store the object into Couchbase. With it, the client will serialize your model object directly into the database, and back again without any extra work on your part — very convenient. Do keep in mind that if you change the structure of your objects, you will have to provide some sort of custom serialization to accomplish the task. You could also create multiple hierarchically named keys and store all of these fields separately in Couchbase. For the sake of keeping this tutorial simple we'll just use serialized objects.

Speaking of the Couchbase client library, now would be a good time to install it, add some references, and get it ready to start writing data into your database.