Biggest advantage to using ASP.Net MVC vs web form

Question

What are some of the advantages of using one over the other?

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

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 3

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 4

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

Answer 5

If you're working with other developers, such as PHP or JSP (and i'm guessing rails) - you're going to have a much easier time converting or collaborating on pages because you wont have all those 'nasty' ASP.NET events and controls everywhere.

Answer 6

MVC lets you have more than one form on a page, A small feature I know but it is handy!

Also the MVC pattern I feel make the code easier to maintain, esp. when you revisiting it after a few months.