Biggest advantage to using ASP.Net MVC vs web forms

Answer 1

In webforms you could also render almost whole html by hand, except few tags like viewstate, eventvalidation and similar, which can be removed with PageAdapters. Nobody force you to use GridView or some other server side control that has bad html rendering output.

I would say that biggest advantage of MVC is SPEED!

Next is forced separation of concern. But it doesn't forbid you to put whole BL and DAL logic inside Controller/Action! It's just separation of view, which can be done also in webforms (MVP pattern for example). A lot of things that people mentions for mvc can be done in webforms, but with some additional effort.
Main difference is that request comes to controller, not view, and those two layers are separated, not connected via partial class like in webforms (aspx + code behind)

Answer 2

I have not seen ANY advantages in MVC over ASP.Net. 10 years ago Microsoft came up with UIP (User Interface Process) as the answer to MVC. It was a flop. We did a large project (4 developers, 2 designers, 1 tester) with UIP back then and it was a sheer nightmare.

Don't just jump in to bandwagon for the sake of Hype. All of the advantages listed above are already available in Asp.Net (With more great tweaks [ New features in Asp.Net 4 ] in Asp.Net 4).

If your development team or a single developer families with Asp.Net just stick to it and make beautiful products quickly to satisfy your clients (who pays for your work hours). MVC will eat up your valuable time and produce the same results as Asp.Net :-)

Answer 3

1. Proper AJAX, e.g. JSONResults no partial page postback nonsense.
2. no viewstate +1
3. No renaming of the HTML IDs.
4. Clean HTML = no bloat and having a decent shot at rendering XHTML or standards compliant pages.
5. No more generated AXD javascript.

Answer 4

MVC Controller:

    [HttpGet]
    public ActionResult DetailList(ImportDetailSearchModel model)
    {
        Data.ImportDataAccess ida = new Data.ImportDataAccess();
        List<Data.ImportDetailData> data = ida.GetImportDetails(model.FileId, model.FailuresOnly);

        return PartialView("ImportSummaryDetailPartial", data);
    }

MVC View:

<table class="sortable">
<thead>
    <tr><th>Unique Id</th><th class="left">Error Type</th><th class="left">Field</th><th class="left">Message</th><th class="left">State</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
    @foreach (Data.ImportDetailData detail in Model)
    {
    <tr><th>@detail.UniqueID</th><th class="left">@detail.ErrorType</th><th class="left">@detail.FieldName</th><th class="left">@detail.Message</th><th class="left">@detail.ItemState</th></tr>
    }
</tbody></table>

How hard is that? No ViewState, No BS Page life-cycle...Just pure efficient code.

Answer 5

I can see the only two advantages for smaller sites being: 6) RESTful urls that enables SEO. 7) No ViewState and PostBack events (and greater performance in general)

Testing for small sites is not an issue, neither are the design advantages when a site is coded properly anyway, MVC in many ways obfuscates and makes changes harder to make. I'm still deciding whether these advantages are worth it.

I can clearly see the advantage of MVC in larger multi-developer sites.

Answer 6

Web forms also gain from greater maturity and support from third party control providers like Telerik.