Why MVC instead of good old ASP.NET? Still not gra

Question

I know this question has been asked before and I read all the answers but they still don't give me the answers I am looking for. I need something concrete. I volunteered to give a presentation on MVC to other developers in our group which forces me to learn it. The big question everyone has is: "What can MVC bring to the table that we can't do in asp.net or MVC can do faster. I have just gone through Nerd Dinner and actually created a complete website that sort of mimics Nerd Dinner. But as great a job that Scott Guthrie did on it, there are big gaps that aren't answered such as, how do I throw a textbox on the listing page with a button and do a simple search. In asp.net, I would throw a textbox, button and grid on the page and bind it to a sproc and away I go. What is the equivalent in MVC. I guess I need a really good tutorial on how to use MVC without using Linq-to-Sql.

I know I am sort of babbling on about this but it is a very serious question that still seems to go unanswered.

On a side note, the View page of MVC brings back nightmares of classic asp with all the in-line code that we got away from way back when with code behind pages. Yes, MVC has Controller and Model classes which are great but I still don't like the classic asp tags in the html.

Help me out here, I really like the concept of MVC and want it to be successful but I need more!

Answer 1

MVC is considered as an alternative to good old asp.net, not the next step. IMHO MVC has a clear advantage if you want to write unit tests for your pages.

But I don't agree that MVC adds anything to classic asp.net in the name of performance, code quality or productivity. You can achieve same performance with asp.net by shutting down viewstate when not necessary or you can be more in control of HTML output by using lightweight server controls. (Repeater instead of DataGrid for example.)