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

Francis Shanahan,

1. Why do you call partial postback as "nonsense"? This is the core feature of Ajax and has been utilized very well in Atlas framework and wonderful third party controls like Telerik

2. I agree to your point regarding the viewstate. But if developers are careful to disable viewstate, this can greatly reduce the size of the HTML which is rendered thus the page becomes light weight.

3. Only HTML Server controls are renamed in ASP.NET Web Form model and not pure html controls. Whatever it may be, why are you so worried if the renaming is done? I know you want to deal with lot of javascript events on the client side but if you design your web pages smartly, you can definitely get all the id's you want

4. Even ASP.NET Web Forms meets XHTML Standards and I don't see any bloating. This is not a justification of why we need an MVC pattern

5. Again, why are you bothered with AXD Javascript? Why does it hurts you? This is not a valid justification again

So far, i am a fan of developing applications using classic ASP.NET Web forms. For eg: If you want to bind a dropdownlist or a gridview, you need a maximum of 30 minutes and not more than 20 lines of code (minimal of course). But in case of MVC, talk to the developers how pain it is.

The biggest downside of MVC is we are going back to the days of ASP. Remember the spaghetti code of mixing up Server code and HTML??? Oh my god, try to read an MVC aspx page mixed with javascript, HTML, JQuery, CSS, Server tags and what not....Any body can answer this question?

Answer 2

My personal opinion is that, Biggest dis-advantage to using ASP.Net MVC is that CODE BLOCKS mixed with HTML...
html hell for the developers who maintain it...

Answer 3

The main advantages of ASP.net MVC are:

1. Enables the full control over the rendered HTML.

2. Provides clean separation of concerns(SoC).

3. Enables Test Driven Development (TDD).

4. Easy integration with JavaScript frameworks.

5. Following the design of stateless nature of the web.

6. RESTful urls that enables SEO.

7. No ViewState and PostBack events

The main advantage of ASP.net Web Form are:

1. It provides RAD development

2. Easy development model for developers those coming from winform development.

Answer 4

ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC are two web frameworks developed by Microsoft - they are both good choices. Neither of the web frameworks are to be replaced by the other nor are there plans to have them 'merged' into a single framework. Continued support and development are done in parallel by Microsoft and neither will be 'going away'.

Each of these web frameworks offers advantages/disadvantages - some of which need to be considered when developing a web application. A web application can be developed using either technology - it might make development for a particular application easier selecting one technology versus the other and vice versa.

ASP.NET Web Forms:

• Development supports state • Gives the illusion that a web application is aware of what the user has been doing, similar to Windows applications. I.e. Makes 'wizard' functionality a little bit easier to implement. Web forms does a great job at hiding a lot of that complexity from the developer.
• Rapid Application Development (RAD) • The ability to just 'jump in' and start delivering web forms. This is disputed by some of the MVC community, but pushed by Microsoft. In the end, it comes down to the level of expertise of the developer and what they are comfortable with. The web forms model probably has less of a learning curve to less experienced developers.
• Larger control toolbox • ASP.NET Web Forms offers a much greater and more robust toolbox (web controls) whereas MVC offers a more primitive control set relying more on rich client-side controls via jQuery (Javascript).
• Mature • It's been around since 2002 and there is an abundance of information with regards to questions, problems, etc. Offers more third-party control - need to consider your existing toolkits.

ASP.NET MVC:

• Separation of concerns (SoC) • From a technical standpoint, the organization of code within MVC is very clean, organized and granular, making it easier (hopefully) for a web application to scale in terms of functionality. Promotes great design from a development standpoint.
• Easier integration with client side tools (rich user interface tools) • More than ever, web applications are increasingly becoming as rich as the applications you see on your desktops. With MVC, it gives you the ability to integrate with such toolkits (such as jQuery) with greater ease and more seamless than in Web Forms.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friendly / Stateless • URL's are more friendly to search engines (i.e. mywebapplication.com/users/ 1 - retrieve user with an ID of 1 vs mywebapplication/users/getuser.aspx (id passed in session)). Similarly, since MVC is stateless, this removes the headache of users who spawn multiple web browsers from the same window (session collisions). Along those same lines, MVC adheres to the stateless web protocol rather than 'battling' against it.
• Works well with developers who need high degree of control • Many controls in ASP.NET web forms automatically generate much of the raw HTML you see when an page is rendered. This can cause headaches for developers. With MVC, it lends itself better towards having complete control with what is rendered and there are no surprises. Even more important, is that the HTML forms typically are much smaller than the Web forms which can equate to a performance boost - something to seriously consider.
• Test Driven Development (TDD) • With MVC, you can more easily create tests for the web side of things. An additional layer of testing will provide yet another layer of defense against unexpected behavior.

Authentication, authorization, configuration, compilation and deployment are all features that are shared between the two web frameworks.

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

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 :-)