Is ASP.NET MVC a bad choice for a large enterprise project?

Question

We are about to embark on a large enterprise application. I am seriously considering using ASP.NET MVC because:

1. We need to use Microsoft technology (biz logic is

Answer 1

Have used WebForms for years and never liked them. Now use Asp.Net MVC for some years and this is so much better. Certainly woud recommend MVC.

Asp.Net MVC has an excellent architecture and is open source. So if you would identify bottelnecks in the http processing chain you could fix it. Most time you would be able to fix performance issues using one of the many extension points provided by Asp.Net MVC, like Binders as an example.

Answer 2

No. One thing that the ASP.NET MVC has over ASP.NET Web Forms in terms of performance is that it doesn't make use of a control tree. The control tree consumes a lot of server side memory and keeps the garbage collector very busy on pages with many controls. I would argue that you would get superior performance from the ASP.NET MVC. The unit testing aspects of it are a real win to.

The flip side of this is that you can't use all of the handy out of the box controls that you get with ASP.NET Web Forms and you'll probably end up doing more client side JavaScript development so the initial development budget would probably need to be greater if you choose ASP.NET MVC over Web Forms, but you would have a superior solution for the long term.

Answer 3

"With MVC, you can't get away with the state nightmare that is so common to webforms development, which means that means your webpages are meth-addict slim"

Upmodded for that quote!

Answer 4

If you're able to use stored procedures then you don't need a big middle-tier like those generated by MVC. All you have to do is pass XML to your stored procs through a simple HTTP handler, get results back from a stored proc, and convert the results to JSON. MVC and other middle-tier stuff only serves to make money for companies that sell IDEs like VS.

Answer 5

ASP.NET MVC is not a problem for Enterprise, but neither is ASP.NET, Silverlight, etc. They are all UI technologies. The majority of your application logic should exist in libraries beneath the UI layer anyway, so pretty much any UI can be used.

1. We need to use Microsoft technology
2. Performance is critical
3. I'd like to test as much as possible

Based on the above, ASP.NET MVC will work. But, you can move the code down below the UI and test. If your algorithms are below the UI, you can tune them without altering the UI. And, if the UI layer is very thin, the perf hit for the UI is negligible.