What's your choice for your next ASP.NET project: Web Forms or MVC? [closed]

Answer 1

I have started a new Web site for our own product a week ago and I couldn't be happier with ASP.NET MVC. Everything seems natural, I always know where to go and look if something doesn't work or does not look the way I intended.

Frankly, the biggest chunk of time I've spent has been CSS. Coding, integration with jQuery... peanuts.

OTOH, if you are not experienced developer, ASP.NET will not appeal to you as it encourages you to go all the way and control all aspects of your site - HTML markup, CSS etc., which in turn means no controls, drag and drop visual editing etc.

Unlike traditional ASP.NET where you are left to yourself and often end up mixing all kinds of UI, persistence (DB) and business logic code in various pages, MVC will guide you and help you structure your app much more consistently. This will not sit with you if you don't like "opinionated" frameworks and/or just want to get the job done without caring about structure of the site, maintainability, scalability etc.

Note that it's perfectly possible not to care about this if all you're building is a one-off intranet site, but for public Internet site I'd choose MVC over classic ASP.NET every time.

Answer 2

While MVC is the new kid on the block there are still a lot of benefits to designing with the Web Forms model.

• Familiarity with the tool
• consistency of look/feel with existing projects
• Tooling/designer
• Postbacks
• Event driven
• Controls to abstract
• 3rd party controls that work
• Rapid development
• Declaritive style

Rachel Appel did a great presentation at MIX on this very topic. You can view the video here:
Choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T23F

Answer 3

MVC baby! And JQuery!

Edit: OK, it's fair enough to say my response warrants a little more info.

I'd choose MVC for the following reasons:

1. I have worked in Rails and found it highly productive. ASP MVC has borrowed so much from Rails that it feels like a direct port in some ways (and that's a good thing in my mind).
2. AJAX is important, but I hate the Microsoft "Atlas" approach to AJAX (whatever the product name is these days). If you're going to do AJAX, you need to understand the HTML and the JavaScript. Frameworks that hide that from you are hurting you more than they are helping you (IMO).
3. JQuery has taken over the world it seems in terms of JavaScript frameworks. ASPMVC is well-integrated with it. I want to learn it, so there's great alignment here.
4. The whole "control" model is a neat idea, but it is more complicated than it appears on the surface. For example, look around on SO for questions about how a UserControl can find its highest level containing control and so forth. The control hierarchy abstraction has leaks in it. Grids are great if they do what you want out of the box, but it's very very hard to customize them to do something they weren't made to do. And the best grid controls on the market (the ones that are highly customizable) are large, bloated, overly complicated beasts. Maybe that shows us that we should drop back down to HTML and let loops in our views do that kind of thing for us.
5. I believe I can build complete, beautiful apps in ASPMVC much faster than in ASP.Net (and I've got some years of ASP.Net under my belt). Look at StackOverflow ... built quickly on ASPMVC with JQuery, and it's fast, scalable and a joy to use IMO.
6. Oh, and it's completely open source! It is ok to read the source code, blog about it, and even modify then redistribute it!

Answer 4

Just say NO to ASP.NET MVC if you are developing for Intranet. For Internet, sure.

Answer 5

I would choose MVC simply because it's designed to be testable and mock'able. That would be the major factor in my decision.

WebForms are much more difficult to Unit Test because they're rooted in several concrete classes that are difficult, it at all possible, to Mock. These include HttpContext, HttpResponse, HttpRequest and HttpCookie.

MVC is designed to be testable and it's API greatly facilitates doing so.

Good article on the testability of MVC: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/ASPNETMVCFrameworkPart2.aspx

Answer 6

I can't say which I'd really go with having not tried MVC yet. But I'd be a bit worried about using it for a really big enterprise project as yet.

Scroll through pass questions and you'll see that there a lots of questions/issues with MVC (compared to good o' WebForms that is). That alone has me worried. And a lot of the questions seems to be for special UI needs. Again having not tried it I don't know how mature it is yet but I'd still be a bit worried.

Maybe someone who has used it for an enterprise project can shed some light.