Biggest advantage to using ASP.Net MVC vs web forms

Answer 1

Modern javascript controls as well as JSON requests can be handled much easily using MVC. There we can use a lot of other mechanisms to post data from one action to another action. That's why we prefer MVC over web forms. Also we can build light weight pages.

Answer 2

The problem with MVC is that even for "experts" it eats up a lot of valuable time and requires lot of effort. Businesses are driven by the basic thing "Quick Solution that works" regardless of technology behind it. WebForms is a RAD technology that saves time and money. Anything that requires more time is not acceptable by businesses.

Answer 3

Francis Shanahan,

1. Why do you call partial postback as "nonsense"? This is the core feature of Ajax and has been utilized very well in Atlas framework and wonderful third party controls like Telerik

2. I agree to your point regarding the viewstate. But if developers are careful to disable viewstate, this can greatly reduce the size of the HTML which is rendered thus the page becomes light weight.

3. Only HTML Server controls are renamed in ASP.NET Web Form model and not pure html controls. Whatever it may be, why are you so worried if the renaming is done? I know you want to deal with lot of javascript events on the client side but if you design your web pages smartly, you can definitely get all the id's you want

4. Even ASP.NET Web Forms meets XHTML Standards and I don't see any bloating. This is not a justification of why we need an MVC pattern

5. Again, why are you bothered with AXD Javascript? Why does it hurts you? This is not a valid justification again

So far, i am a fan of developing applications using classic ASP.NET Web forms. For eg: If you want to bind a dropdownlist or a gridview, you need a maximum of 30 minutes and not more than 20 lines of code (minimal of course). But in case of MVC, talk to the developers how pain it is.

The biggest downside of MVC is we are going back to the days of ASP. Remember the spaghetti code of mixing up Server code and HTML??? Oh my god, try to read an MVC aspx page mixed with javascript, HTML, JQuery, CSS, Server tags and what not....Any body can answer this question?

Answer 4

My 2 cents:

• ASP.net forms is great for Rapid application Development and adding business value quickly. I still use it for most intranet applications.
• MVC is great for Search Engine Optimization as you control the URL and the HTML to a greater extent
• MVC generally produces a much leaner page - no viewstate and cleaner HTML = quick loading times
• MVC easy to cache portions of the page. -MVC is fun to write :- personal opinion ;-)

Answer 5

Anyone old enough to remember classic ASP will remember the nightmare of opening a page with code mixed in with html and javascript - even the smallest page was a pain to figure out what the heck it was doing. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but MVC looks like going back to those bad old days.

When ASP.Net came along it was hailed as the savior, separating code from content and allowing us to have web designers create the html and coders work on the code behind. If we didn't want to use ViewState, we turned it off. If we didn't want to use code behind for some reason, we could place our code inside the html just like classic ASP. If we didn't want to use PostBack we redirected to another page for processing. If we didn't want to use ASP.Net controls we used standard html controls. We could even interrogate the Response object if we didn't want to use ASP.Net runat="server" on our controls.

Now someone in their great wisdom (probably someone who never programmed classic ASP) has decided it's time to go back to the days of mixing code with content and call it "separation of concerns". Sure, you can create cleaner html, but you could with classic ASP. To say "you are not programming correctly if you have too much code inside your view" is like saying "if you wrote well structured and commented code in classic ASP it is far cleaner and better than ASP.NET"

If I wanted to go back to mixing code with content I'd look at developing using PHP which has a far more mature environment for that kind of development. If there are so many problems with ASP.NET then why not fix those issues?

Last but not least the new Razor engine means it is even harder to distinguish between html and code. At least we could look for opening and closing tags i.e. <% and %> in ASP but now the only indication will be the @ symbol.

It might be time to move to PHP and wait another 10 years for someone to separate code from content once again.

Answer 6

Main benefit i find is it forces the project into a more testable strcuture. This can pretty easily be done with webforms as well (MVP pattern), but requires the developer to have an understanding of this, many dont.

Webforms and MVC are both viable tools, both excel in different areas.

I personally use web forms as we primarily develop B2B/ LOB apps. But we always do it with an MVP pattern with wich we can achieve 95+% code coverage for our unit tests. This also alows us to automate testing on properties of webcontrols property value is exposed through the view eg

bool IMyView.IsAdminSectionVisible{
       get{return pnlAdmin.Visible;}
       get{pnlAdmin.Visible=value;}
    }

) I dont think this level of testing is as easily achived in MVC, without poluting my model.