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

Main benefit i find is it forces the project into a more testable strcuture. This can pretty easily be done with webforms as well (MVP pattern), but requires the developer to have an understanding of this, many dont.

Webforms and MVC are both viable tools, both excel in different areas.

I personally use web forms as we primarily develop B2B/ LOB apps. But we always do it with an MVP pattern with wich we can achieve 95+% code coverage for our unit tests. This also alows us to automate testing on properties of webcontrols property value is exposed through the view eg

bool IMyView.IsAdminSectionVisible{
       get{return pnlAdmin.Visible;}
       get{pnlAdmin.Visible=value;}
    }

) I dont think this level of testing is as easily achived in MVC, without poluting my model.

Answer 2

My 2 cents:

• ASP.net forms is great for Rapid application Development and adding business value quickly. I still use it for most intranet applications.
• MVC is great for Search Engine Optimization as you control the URL and the HTML to a greater extent
• MVC generally produces a much leaner page - no viewstate and cleaner HTML = quick loading times
• MVC easy to cache portions of the page. -MVC is fun to write :- personal opinion ;-)

Answer 3

Anyone old enough to remember classic ASP will remember the nightmare of opening a page with code mixed in with html and javascript - even the smallest page was a pain to figure out what the heck it was doing. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but MVC looks like going back to those bad old days.

When ASP.Net came along it was hailed as the savior, separating code from content and allowing us to have web designers create the html and coders work on the code behind. If we didn't want to use ViewState, we turned it off. If we didn't want to use code behind for some reason, we could place our code inside the html just like classic ASP. If we didn't want to use PostBack we redirected to another page for processing. If we didn't want to use ASP.Net controls we used standard html controls. We could even interrogate the Response object if we didn't want to use ASP.Net runat="server" on our controls.

Now someone in their great wisdom (probably someone who never programmed classic ASP) has decided it's time to go back to the days of mixing code with content and call it "separation of concerns". Sure, you can create cleaner html, but you could with classic ASP. To say "you are not programming correctly if you have too much code inside your view" is like saying "if you wrote well structured and commented code in classic ASP it is far cleaner and better than ASP.NET"

If I wanted to go back to mixing code with content I'd look at developing using PHP which has a far more mature environment for that kind of development. If there are so many problems with ASP.NET then why not fix those issues?

Last but not least the new Razor engine means it is even harder to distinguish between html and code. At least we could look for opening and closing tags i.e. <% and %> in ASP but now the only indication will be the @ symbol.

It might be time to move to PHP and wait another 10 years for someone to separate code from content once again.

Answer 4

1. Proper AJAX, e.g. JSONResults no partial page postback nonsense.
2. no viewstate +1
3. No renaming of the HTML IDs.
4. Clean HTML = no bloat and having a decent shot at rendering XHTML or standards compliant pages.
5. No more generated AXD javascript.

Answer 5

You don't feel bad about using 'non post-back controls' anymore - and figuring how to smush them into a traditional asp.net environment.

This means that modern (free to use) javascript controls such this or this or this can all be used without that trying to fit a round peg in a square hole feel.

Answer 6

Modern javascript controls as well as JSON requests can be handled much easily using MVC. There we can use a lot of other mechanisms to post data from one action to another action. That's why we prefer MVC over web forms. Also we can build light weight pages.