Why MVC instead of good old ASP.NET? Still not grasping why I should go this route?

Question

I know this question has been asked before and I read all the answers but they still don\'t give me the answers I am looking for. I need something concrete. I volunteered to g

Answer 1

I was also learning MVC in the past few days. My experience is that is provides a much less complicated model of the web.

While WebForms promised that it will make web development very close to Windows development with a complicated event model, controls, and all the stuff.
Why? Because at the time Microsoft's developer base was mostly VB and C++ developers who were thinking in terms of forms, controls, and this provided an easy way for them to begin developing for the web.

What MVC provides is more control over the underlying protocol and more control over the HTML you output.
Plus, they give you ASP.NET routing built-in, so your URLs will also look and feel much better.

An example: StackOverflow was built using ASP.NET MVC.

Your example:

how do I throw a textbox on the listing page with a button and do a simple search. In asp.net, I would throw a textbox, button and grid on the page and bind it to a sproc and away I go.

You create an Action for it in the current Controller, throw a form on the page with Html.BeginForm which points to that action (remember, with MVC, you can have multiple forms on pages), throw a textbox and a submit button in it.

Then, according to your taste, you can either create a separate view for the search results, or reuse the existing view. The new action can be named the same as the old one, with [HttpPost] on it (or [HttpGet] if you prefer that), so the URL won't confuse the users more. You can then call your SPROC in your action and you are good to go.
(All this accomplishable in a matter of minutes.)

The other thing I like about MVC is that it is basically VERY EASY to create CRUD operations with it. (Like NerdDinner.)
VS generates 80% of the code required for your views, which then you can customise very easily.

I recommend you reading the whole book and not only the NerdDinner free episode, it gives you a very good picture about the technology.