Is ASP.NET webforms swept under the rug to make ro

问题:

I've read all the marketing speak about how mvc and webforms are complementary etc...

However it seems that all the blogs talk about is mvc and the only news coming out is about mvc.

Is Microsoft going to continue to IMPROVE webforms as a first class citizen or will it just be a supported technology as they move all their real efforts, developers and resources to mvc over time?

Is there any real evidence of any new exciting improvements coming to webforms in the near future?

回答1:

You could do worse than take a look at Phil Haak's post from November:

The Future of WebForms and ASP.NET MVC

He points out 5 key things anounced under ASP.NET at PDC last year:

1. Core Infrastructure including scale and performance
2. Web Forms including issues with Client IDs, ViewState, CSS use, etc
3. AJAX
4. Data and Dynamic Data
5. MVC

Coupled with that, there are things that have been built as part of ASP.NET MVC that have already been released for webforms like the Routing module which is going to be great help in some of my projects, even without using MVC.

On top of those, there are also a number of changes coming in VS2010 that should help web developers using either WebForms or MVC, which would be good.

Bloggers tend to talk about what is shiny and "new", that's the way things go - you're bound to see a lot of words written about it because of that, although MVC is hardly a new design pattern - it goes back at least 30 years.

The same could be said of WPF/Silverlight - are they WinForms/WebForms killers? No. They are alternative offerings, with some benefits over the earlier way of doing things, but also with some differences/drawbacks.

回答2:

I was at a conference (Remix 08) and Scott Gu said they will definatly be continuing to support both methods and that MVC was not appropriate for every application. Scott said there were a number of coming improvements for web forms model (although didnt say what they were).

The web forms model will not disapear because:
Web forms model is better for some types of applications, e.g. small apps, those requiring long processes that make use of view state useful
Many applications are using it
Many third party components developed for it
ASP.net implementation is not mature yet (although does seem pretty good so far)

Microsoft will probably announce a number of new features in PDC in a few weeks time.

回答3:

Microsoft is finally coming to terms to one basic fact of development. You can't provide the ultimate solution to any problem. This is why MVC is being developed, and Scott Guthrie is clearly stating that MVC is meant for larger, more enterprise-y sites. Web forms will continue to exist and be developed as a simple, RAD-based approach to web development.

If you take a step back and review all recent improvements and additions to the Microsoft stack, you can quite easily categorize them between these two classes. For example:

• Data access: LINQ-to-SQL vs EntityFramework
• Remoting: WCF vs WebServices
• LiveID: LiveID (web) authentication vs RPS authentication
• ...

I only hope that Microsoft will make this distinction clearer with time, because there seems to be a lot of confusion among developers as to what tool should be chosen for which task.

In conclusion, I think that Microsoft will keep on developing both because they cater to different developer profiles. Microsoft has obviously a lot of interest in growing its developer base as much as possible and to make the .NET stack as useful as possible.

回答4:

I am going to go out on a limb here and disagree with the general idea that MVC is the "enterprise" framework here or is somehow the better of the two.

MVC is great! But just look at the name. It stands for "Model, View, Controller"... see the "view" in there?

Now look at the competition, "Web Forms"... see the "forms" in that one?

MVC does a great job in "view" type situations. For sites that publish content ("views" of information) MVC probably has an edge, especially for larger systems that need a lot of testing and very a formal design to support intelligent view switching.

For applications that interact heavily with the user via forms (data collection and data entry heavy apps) web forms has an edge due to the inherent use of form posts as a primary mechanism.

While you can do views with web forms and you can do forms with MVC, each has trade-offs. In the current state of MVC, I find that writing heavy data entry "views" is much more difficult and painful than with web forms... and I don't mean a little bit.

In the future I do expect to see MVC get better with dealing with data entry scenarios, but these scenarios will likely come at a pretty high price compared to doing those with web forms.

Neither is more "enterprise" level than the other as far as I can tell... what I'm most interested in going forward are hybrid applications that use MVC for the display and publishing end of the business while web forms are used more naturally for heavy data entry end... all in the same web project... I sure hope we see something like that.

回答5:

Before word of the MVC framework started spreading, we spent a good deal of time at my company developing our own .NET MVC framework.

This was because we didn't want to be constrained by the limitations of the WebForms abstraction - we wanted to avoid the 'clunky' feel and user interface compromises that WebForms seems to impose on all by the most heavily customised applications. Also, we wanted friendly URIs and we wanted a better separation of front-end and back-end development than that offered by WebForms (we settled on an XML / XSLT architecture).

In my opinion, WebForms in fact offer a much poorer method of interacting with the user specifically due to the use of ViewState, PostBacks, etc etc that abstract the actual mechanics of HTTP from the developer - this gives them less latitude in how they allow users to interact with the system. The classic example is that because WebForms pages are almost always the result of a POST, if the user attempts to refresh the page, the user gets a nasty warning message from the browser. The pattern in the traditional web development world for dealing with this has always been to include a 302 Redirect directive in the HTTP Response, thus sticking to the original HTTP paradigm of GETs being for retrieving data, and POSTs being for sending data. Other, similar problems exist such as the inability to have two forms on a page (for example a login form to a website on a different server).

That said, for RAD, WebForms are brilliant. I'm currently developing the admin application for a webapp we've developed using our custom MVC framework, and I'm flying through since all I need is to display the contents of a load of database tables, and in some cases allow the user to edit them, in various different ways.

I think that if we need to convince ourselves that MS are going to continue to support WebForms - just think of all the ex-Windows developers. These are the people that WebForms was originally developed for, and they're not going away. Corporate developers will be your saviour if you're a WebForms fan.