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I'm sorry if this is a stupid or obvious question, but I've spent the better part of a week researching, and I really can't find any resources that explain what MVC 4 and Razor are, and what they are intended to do in web development. I'm not necessarily asking for a really detailed description, even a link to a website or the name of a book that doesn't explain MVC 4 by referencing other technologies that I have also never used. I've looked through articles, articles and tutorials on everything from MSDN to graduate papers and I just don't get it.
I know what MVC the design pattern is, but one of the main things I can't get a straight answer to is what the difference is between MVC the pattern and MVC 4 the framework. As a web developer, will I ever have to change or make use of the frameworks, or is it something that is supposed to "stay out of your way" (to quote another SO post.) Is it something that gets generated by VS and I will never have to touch?
Again, I'm sorry if this is obvious, maybe I'm trying to make this more complicated than it actually is. All I have been looking for is a straight forward answer with concrete examples that don't contradict or complicate it any further.
Please...I'm at my wits end here. My last question was apparently too vague and got voted down and closed, so I tried to be more specific, but part of my problem is what are the right questions to ask.If there is anything that can say to clarify,please tell me.
I certainly don't want to discourage you any more than you appear to be at the moment, but in my opinion, if you can't make head or tail of the huge amount of material that already exists on MVC, then perhaps you are just not ready for it yet. That's OK - in fact Microsoft recognise that MVC is complicated, which is why they introduced the ASP.NET Web Pages framework (which is what gave birth to Razor syntax).
My advice would be to follow the link and download WebMatrix. Then follow some of the Web Pages tutorials. That way you can get your head around Razor without worrying too much about MVC for the time being.
Incidentally, ASP.NET MVC is a web development framework that enables you to build web applications based on the MVC pattern. You need to understand how MVC works in order to make use of the framework. You need to understand what Models are, what Views are and the role that Controllers play in the whole thing.
The framework itself is not an example of MVC.
Razor is a templating syntax that allows you to intermix C# (or VB) with HTML to output dynamic content in a View in MVC or a page in the Web Pages framework.
I know it may seem confusing, but it seems to me that you are over complicating things.
The simple matter is that MVC is a design pattern. That is, it's an abstract thing.. a philosophy of sorts. It's not a concrete thing. A design pattern simply gives you a description of how the pattern is supposed to work, and while it may give you a sample implementation, in general it leaves that implementation up to you.
ASP.NET MVC (whichever version) is a specific application framework that uses the MVC pattern as its basis. In other words, it's a concrete implementation of the MVC design pattern.
In fact, the ASP.NET MVC implementation isn't even a "true" implementation of the MVC design pattern, as certain compromises are necessary to make it work in a web based model. So it's really more "MVC design pattern inspired".
You're overthinking things. Just accept that ASP.NET MVC is a framework library that implements and MVC design pattern.
As for Razor, it's merely a templating library. That is, it allows you to define a page layout as text, and insert values at specific places (place-holders). It also allows code to be executed during the process of rendering a template, although this is discouraged in MVC except for very simple cases.
Razor is also used in ASP.NET WebPages technology, in those cases it tends to be more like PHP or classic asp in that all code exists in code blocks within the template itself. Both ASP.NET and WebPages use the Razor templating engine (also called a View Engine) but they use them in different ways.
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I find myself on the edge of trying out ASP.NET MVC but there is still "something" holding me back. Are you still waiting to try it, and if so, why? If you finally decided to use it, what helped you get over your hesitation?
I'm not worried about it from a technical point of view; I know the pros and cons of web forms vs ASP.NET MVC. My concerns are more on the practical side.
Will Microsoft continue to support ASP.NET MVC if they don't reach some critical threshold of developers/customers using it?
Are customers willing to try ASP.NET MVC? Have you had to convince a customer to use it? How did that go?
Are there major sites using ASP.NET MVC (besides SO)? Could you provide links if you have them?
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
If you have any other concerns preventing you from using ASP.NET MVC, what are they?
If you had concerns but felt they were addressed and now use ASP.NET MVC, could you list them as well?
Will Microsoft continue to support ASP.NET MVC if they don't reach some critical threshold of developers/customers using it?
They will for sure.
Are customers willing to try ASP.NET MVC? Have you had to convince a customer to use it? How did that go?
Customers care about high quality products and price. Just convince them that Mvc will help to raise quality and lower price. Shouldn't be hard.
Are there major sites using ASP.NET MVC (besides SO)? Could you provide links if you have them?
Isn't it enough with SO? :)
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
I did try and didn't regret it at all. It kills me being forced to work on web forms project again.
Go for it!
I believe ASP.NET MVC has reached that critical threshold, as evident by VS 2010 tooling, ASP.NET, MS employee blog and the extensive effort Microsoft put into the framework thus far. I don't see this framework perishing in the next decade (or two).
By customers, I assume you mean people that I build websites for? The only issue I find with ASP.NET is the hosting solutions. However, this issue is becoming moot as more affordable hosting solutions are found. But usually, if I believe in the technology and that it will work for my customer, my customer trusts me and agrees on it. The customer is also usually comforted by the fact that ASP.NET-MVC is a Microsoft product. Having a big company behind a technology is always a nice thing to have, since you can rest assured it will be supported for quite awhile with frequent updates.
ASP.NET MVC is a relatively new framework, and slow adoption of new technology is expected. But this is what I found: http://weblogs.asp.net/mikebosch/archive/2008/05/05/gallery-of-live-asp-net-mvc-sites.aspx . I think you'll see a big influx of websites using ASP.NET-MVC this year when VS 2010/.NET 4 are released with built-in support for ASP.NET MVC.
I never enjoyed developing with C#/ASP.NET more than when I started using ASP.NET-MVC. To a certain extent, ASP.NET-MVC forces you to write good code more so than WebForms due to ASP.NET-MVC inherit separation of concerns and easy customization. And the ability to control HTML output is essential, a feature that was difficult with ASP.NET-WebForms (pre 4.0).
I use MVC and hate it, especially, the front end, web form are far more better in the front end... With loads of javacript on the page, that means it is hard to maintain and take a longer time to develop and debug..
To do a very complicated page, the flexibility of MVC is limited, you will end up with using a lot of javascript control, and you know what? Different controls use different version of jquery, and they have conflict..
It is actually the javascript, and lack of UI flexibility that pulls me off, especially you are NOT working on your code
and we have more issues of browser compatability, with the new browsers coming, you are going to shoot yourself with MVC
MVC front end is very fast if your web site is not too big.. The backend of MVC is very good, it is the front end that blows it over
Why not? The rest of my team doesn't want to.
I have not yet actually tried coding up some ASP.Net MVC(looked at a few examples though) but the main thing holding us back from using it is that all of our code is currently written using Webforms.
Regarding Microsoft support ASP.Net. First Scott Guthrie, the VP of Development at MS is behind it, so that's one feather in its cap. Second its open source now so even if for some strange reason MS decides not to support it going forward you can still tweak it on your own if you need to. In addtion the MVC pattern is somethign that more and more web development platforms are using. It is a great pattern for web development and as a result I can't think of any reason MS wouldn't continue to support it.
If by customers you mean end users, honestly they shouldn't care how you implement the site. If by customers you mean consulting clients, if you can develop faster and they have the servers that can host it, I would think they would be open to it. On top of that youre MVC sites should use less bandwidth than a typical Web Forms web site (IMHO) mainly because there is a lot of additional stuff put into a Web Forms page (for example extra attributes in the HTML htat are tailored for web forms, ViewState) so that should be seen as a positive by them. Now if by customers you mean people integrating with you, then its also a plus since MVC makes it very easy to implement REST based web services (not that WFC doesn't but MVC works very nicely as well).
Hmm major sites using MVC, so far I've found a list here I also know of a number of apps at different companies where large scale MVC apps are in development. I wish I could give more detail, but unfortuantely I can't at the moment.
When I first started out with ASP.Net MVC I thought I was going to hate it. I wasn't a huge fan of Web Forms either, but MVC just felt like a step back to ASP development back before .Net came out. Then I started really getting into it and really finding the pattern is clean, concise, extensible, maintainable, and easy to pick up. Honestly I don't want to ever go back to Web Forms, and anytime I find myself doing a .Net web app I make a point of making it an MVC project.
You need to choose what's more appropriate to your product. Webforms has a few things to recommend it over mvc in some situations.
The big one is a developer working on in-house tools at small to medium shops. In these circumstances:
Large viewstates are not likely to be a problem, because your users typically have 100Mbit upload to your web server rather than a measly 128Kbit or less.
Javascript is likley to be supported by everyone
Development time matters more than widespread cross-browser compatibility or even nice design.
You're likely stuck working with inherited devs who used to do desktop/forms style development, or have a lot of churn among junior devs who don't really know web development.
All of those things together mean that webforms is still a very good fit. And let's be honest: a lot more programmers work at these small to medium in-house shops than do public internet work. So webforms isn't going anywhere.
That said, one of the big things coming up among these small shops is likely to be taking their internal tools and making them available offsite for telecommuters. In that situation, you need to start worrying more about WAN performance odd browser issues where MVC might be a better fit.
Dell is hiring masses of ASP.NET MVC developers in Texas and India for major work on many of their websites.
According to The Gu, ASP.NET MVC will have it's own product and development cycle. It is now 100% detached from ASP.NET WebForms and it's not going away.
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
I do not regret trying out MVC in fact I love it. When I started it out I hated it I kept looking for the code behind file and was unsure at first how to get values out textboxes and stuff without going textbox1.Text;
Now I cringe every time I go back to webforms and wish I could write it in ASP.NET MVC because I just love how your working with html instead of using drag and drop controls that usually make your life alot harder if you got to customize them to much. I love how ASP.NET MVC likes to focus on good code like design patterns such as the Repository pattern and how to do unit test using TDD.
I have not picked up a book yet in MVC where they talked about how to make good code. I am not saying you can't write good code in Webforms but in the books and classes that I seen teach ASP.NET this never seems to be a main focus.
Like for instance I hate the datasource controls I am tutoring some people in WebForms and they love to drag a datasource in and then write their SQL statements in that datasource. Then in the code behind they use these datasorces to insert their records.
So every time they need to make a new SQL query a new datsource is dragged on and made. So now you all your logic is all mixed together. It makes it so much harder to find out whats going on, switch to different things if needed then of course it is limiting.
Something that revolves around the name "controller" can only mean problems.
I tried following the Nerddinner http://www.asp.net/mVC/ tutorial this morning. I'm comfortable in webforms, but nothing in that nerddinner tutorial made sense, just an outdated, hardcoded recipe from mvc1.0 that dosent even compile with the current mvc2.0, probably Wrox made this tutorial, only they can come up with only formating and no content.
I didn't see anything in there that was good; a bunch of hardcoded conventions I didn't need.
I certainly didn't see anything in there that would make me say I'd want to move from webforms, although this seems to be all the propaganda I read.
They put this tutorial based around wizards, on http://www.asp.net/mVC/ main page, while claiming the model is lean, all of it is generated code they don't explain, the default mvc template project has something like 15 references.
This 2 page website managed to be slow to build and to load.
Was 30 minutes in it until I realized my data model didn't match the one from the tutorial and many things that had been generated using the create controller and create view wizards were now failing.
With what I was provided in the rushed tutorial, I wasn't able to recover the project. I'll just pass until I find better documentation.
I've not spent much time in the last 3-4 years doing much browser development. So I'm a little behind the times in this area. I'm curious if ASP.NET MVC makes developing complex browser based screens/forms any easier? In the past, the thing I hated most about developer browser apps was hard tedious it was creating screens/forms.
Without pointing out the obvious, you are still working with HTML/CSS and all of the inherent limitations that come with that.
MVC really just provides a more controlled method of passing data around your app. In that respect it's easier to manage data, but it's still being rendered in HTML/CSS.
I haven't built a massive application on the scale of SO, but in my small apps, it still comes down to HTML/CSS.
The MVC 2.0 adds a whole bunch of stuff that makes building forms easier. For example take a look at EditorFor and DisplayFor.
http://davidhayden.com/blog/dave/archive/2009/08/21/HtmlEditorForScaffoldColumnAttribute.aspx
MVC 2.0 also brings form validation using code annotation. You decorate your model properties with attributes from the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and that is uses to build validation rules.
None of this makes it quite as "easy" as WebForms to build forms, but then you don't get stuck with all the old WebForms baggage either.
uh it was a little too easy before with webforms. you're not gonna like that aspect of MVC much...
It's more on the server side where the whole MVC side of it comes into play. Personally I find it simpler when creating AJAX intensive UI's, as hooking up actions to a javascript call seems a bit simpler, but in general, web UI development is what it is.
As an aside - if you don't like creating web UIs (and it's not everybody's cup of tea) - can you structure your team so that you're doing more of the server side code and get a UI developer to run up the front end stuff?
In my opinion it is a lot easier. For one thing we have much better client side javascript frameworks that helps a lot. And with asp.net mvc you don't have to worry about annoying server controls, you will instead have complete control of the html and javascript.
As above, nothing has changed. You still create HTML and CSS, the biggest gain is in using Javascript and Ajax to improve user experiance.
This is very subjective based on your personal experience and what exactly you mean by "complex browser based forms".
If you've been behind in web dev the last few years, then regardless of what route you take, you have some core HTML/CSS/JS stuff to catch up on because that ultimately where the UI gets worked.
I just listened to the StackOverflow team's 17th podcast, and they talked so highly of ASP.NET MVC that I decided to check it out.
But first, I want to be sure it's worth it. I already created a base web application (for other developers to build on) for a project that's starting in a few days and wanted to know, based on your experience, if I should take the time to learn the basics of MVC and re-create the base web application with this model.
Are there really big pros that'd make it worthwhile?
EDIT: It's not an existing project, it's a project about to start, so if I'm going to do it it should be now...
I just found this
It does not, however, use the existing post-back model for interactions back to the server. Instead, you'll route all end-user interactions to a Controller class instead - which helps ensure clean separation of concerns and testability (it also means no viewstate or page lifecycle with MVC based views).
How would that work? No viewstate? No events?
If you are quite happy with WebForms today, then maybe ASP.NET MVC isn't for you.
I have been frustrated with WebForms for a really long time. I'm definitely not alone here. The smart-client, stateful abstraction over the web breaks down severely in complex scenarios. I happen to love HTML, Javascript, and CSS. WebForms tries to hide that from me. It also has some really complex solutions to problems that are really not that complex. Webforms is also inherently difficult to test, and while you can use MVP, it's not a great solution for a web environment...(compared to MVC).
MVC will appeal to you if...
- you want more control over your HTML
- want a seamless ajax experience like every other platform has
- want testability through-and-through
- want meaningful URLs
- HATE dealing with postback & viewstate issues
And as for the framework being Preview 5, it is quite stable, the design is mostly there, and upgrading is not difficult. I started an app on Preview 1 and have upgraded within a few hours of the newest preview being available.
It's important to keep in mind that MVC and WebForms are not competing, and one is not better than the other. They are simply different tools. Most people seem to approach MVC vs WebForms as "one must be a better hammer than the other". That is wrong. One is a hammer, the other is a screwdriver. Both are used in the process of putting things together, but have different strengths and weaknesses.
If one left you with a bad taste, you were probably trying to use a screwdriver to pound a nail. Certain problems are cumbersome with WebForms that become elegant and simple with MVC, and vice-versa.
I have used ASP.NET MVC (I even wrote a HTTPModule that lets you define the routes in web.config), and I still get a bitter taste in my mouth about it.
It seems like a giant step backwards in organization and productivity. Maybe its not for some, but I've got webforms figured out, and they present no challenge to me as far as making them maintainable.
That, and I don't endorse the current "TEST EVERYTHING" fad...
ASP.NET MVC basically allows you to separate the responsibility of different sections of the code. This enable you to test your application. You can test your Views, Routes etc. It also does speed up the application since now there is no ViewState or Postback.
BUT, there are also disadvantages. Since, you are no using WebForms you cannot use any ASP.NET control. It means if you want to create a GridView you will be running a for loop and create the table manually. If you want to use the ASP.NET Wizard in MVC then you will have to create on your own.
It is a nice framework if you are sick and tired of ASP.NET webform and want to perform everything on your own. But you need to keep in mind that would you benefit from creating all the stuff again or not?
In general I prefer Webforms framework due to the rich suite of controls and the automatic plumbing.
I would create a test site first, and see what the team thinks, but for me I wouldn't go back to WebForms after using MVC.
Some people don't like code mixed with HTML, and I can understand that, but I far prefer the flexibility over things like Page Lifecycle, rendering HTML and biggy for me - no viewstate cruft embedded in the page source.
Some people prefer MVC for better testibility, but personally most of my code is in the middle layer and easily tested anyway...
#Juan Manuel Did you ever work in classic ASP? When you had to program all of your own events and "viewstatish" items (like a dropdown recalling its selected value after form submission)?
If so, then ASP.NET MVC will not feel that awkward off the bat. I would check out Rob Conery's Awesome Series "MVC Storefront" where he has been walking through the framework and building each expected component for a storefront site. It's really impressive and easy to follow along (catching up is tough because Rob has been reall active and posted A LOT in that series).
Personally, and quite contrary to Jeff Atwood's feelings on the topic, I rather liked the webform model. It was totally different than the vbscript/classic ASP days for sure but keeping viewstate in check and writing your own CSS friendly controls was enjoyable, actually.
Then again, note that I said "liked". ASP.NET MVC is really awesome and more alike other web technologies out there. It certainly is easier to shift from ASP.NET MVC to RAILS if you like to or need to work on multiple platforms. And while, yes, it is very stable obviously (this very site), if your company disallows "beta" software of any color; implementing it into production at the this time might be an issue.
#Jonathan Holland I saw that you were voted down, but that is a VERY VALID point. I have been reading some posts around the intertubes where people seem to be confusing ASP.NET MVC the framework and MVC the pattern.
MVC in of itself is a DESIGN PATTERN. If all you are looking for is a "separation of concerns" then you can certainly achieve that with webforms. Personally, I am a big fan of the MVP pattern in a standard n-tier environment.
If you really want TOTAL control of your mark-up in the ASP.NET world, then MVC the ramework is for you.
If you are a professional ASP.NET developer, and have some time to spare on learning new stuff, I would certainly recommend that you spend some time trying out ASP.NET MVC. It may not be the solution to all your problems, and there are lots of projects that may benefit more from a traditional webform implementation, but while trying to figure out MVC you will certainly learn a lot, and it might bring up lots of ideas that you can apply on your job.
One good thing that I noticed while going through many blog posts and video tutorials while trying to develop a MVC pet-project is that most of them follow the current best practices (TDD, IoC, Dependency Injection, and to a lower extent POCO), plus a lot of JQuery to make the experience more interesting for the user, and that is stuff that I can apply on my current webform apps, and that I wasn't exposed in such depth before.
The ASP.NET MVC way of doing things is so different from webforms that it will shake up a bit your mind, and that for a developer is very good!
OTOH for a total beginner to web development I think MVC is definitely a better start because it offers a good design pattern out of the box and is closer to the way that the web really works (HTML is stateless, after all). On MVC you decide on every byte that goes back and forth on the wire (at least while you don't go crazy on html helpers). Once the guy gets that, he or she will be better equipped to move to the "artificial" facilities provided by ASP.NET webforms and server controls.
If you like to use server controls which do a lot of work for you, you will NOT like MVC because you will need to do a lot of hand coding in MVC. If you like the GridView, expect to write one yourself or use someone else's.
MVC is not for everyone, specially if you're not into unit testing the GUI part. If you're comfortable with web forms, stay with it. Web Forms 4.0 will fix some of the current shortcomings like the ID's which are automatically assigned by ASP.NET. You will have control of these in the next version.
Unless the developers you are working with are familiar with MVC pattern I wouldn't. At a minimum I'd talk with them first before making such a big change.
I'm trying to make that same decision about ASP.NET MVC, Juan Manuel. I'm now waiting for the right bite-sized project to come along with which I can experiment. If the experiment goes well--my gut says it will--then I'm going to architect my new large projects around the framework.
With ASP.NET MVC you lose the viewstate/postback model of ASP.NET Web Forms. Without that abstraction, you work much more closely with the HTML and the HTTP POST and GET commands. I believe the UI programming is somewhat in the direction of classic ASP.
With that inconvenience, comes a greater degree of control. I've very often found myself fighting the psuedo-session garbage of ASP.NET and the prospect of regaining complete control of the output HTML seems very refreshing.
It's perhaps either the best--or the worst--of both worlds.
5 Reasons You Should Take a Closer Look at ASP.NET MVC
I dont´t know ASP.NET MVC, but I am very familiar with MVC pattern. I don´t see another way to build professional applications without MVC. And it has to be MVC model 2, like Spring or Struts. By the way, how you people were building web applications without MVC? When you have a situation that some kind of validation is necessary on every request, as validating if user is authenticated, what is your solution? Some kind of include(validate.aspx) in every page?
Have you never heard of N-Tier development?
Ajax, RAD (webforms with ajax are anti-RAD very often), COMPLETE CONTROL (without developing whole bunch of code and cycles). webforms are good only to bind some grid and such and not for anything else, and one more really important thing - performance. when u get stuck into the web forms hell u will switch on MVC sooner or later.
I wouldn't recommend just making the switch on an existing project. Perhaps start a small "demo" project that the team can use to experiment with the technology and (if necessary) learn what they need to and demonstrate to management that it is worthwhile to make the switch. In the end, even the dev team might realize they aren't ready or it's not worth it.
Whatever you do, be sure to document it. Perhaps if you use a demo project, write a postmortem for future reference.
I dont´t know ASP.NET MVC, but I am very familiar with MVC pattern. I don´t see another way to build professional applications without MVC. And it has to be MVC model 2, like Spring or Struts. By the way, how you people were building web applications without MVC? When you have a situation that some kind of validation is necessary on every request, as validating if user is authenticated, what is your solution? Some kind of include(validate.aspx) in every page?
No, you shouldn't. Feel free to try it out on a new project, but a lot of people familiar with ASP.NET webforms aren't loving it yet, due to having to muck around with raw HTML + lots of different concepts + pretty slim pickings on documentation/tutorials.
Is the fact that ASP.net MVC is only in 'Preview 5' be a cause for concern when looking into it?
I know that StackOverflow was created using it, but is there a chance that Microsoft could implement significant changes to the framework before it is officially out of beta/alpha/preview release?
If you are dead set on using an MVC framework, then I would rather set out to use Castle project's one...
When that's said I personally think WebControls have a lot of advantages, like for instance being able to create event driven applications which have a stateful client and so on. Most of the arguments against WebControls are constructed because of lack of understanding the WebControl model etc. And not because they actually are truly bad...
MVC is not a Silver Bullet, especially not Microsoft MVC...
I have seen some implementation of MVC framework where for the sake of testability, someone rendered the whole HTML in code. In this case the view is also a testable code. But I said, my friend, putting HTML in code is a maintenance nightmare and he said well I like everything compiled and tested. I didn't argue, but later found that he did put this HTML into resource files and the craziness continued...
Little did he realized that the whole idea of separating View also solved the maintenance part. It outweighs the testability in some applications. We do not need to test the HTML design if we are using WYSWYG tool. WebForms are good for that reason.
I have often seen people abusing postback and viewstate and blaming it on the ASP .NET model.
Remember the best webpages are still the .HTMLs and that's where is the Power of ASP .NET MVC.
As someone with some winforms and client applications experience - is it worth going back and learning the way traditional ASP .NET pages work, or is it okay with moving straight into ASP .NET MVC?
I'm kind of looking for pitfalls or traps in my knowledge of general C#, that I won't know from the screencast series and things on the ASP .NET site.
Here is the great thing about MVC. It works closer to the base of the framework than normal ASP.NET Web Forms. So by using MVC and understanding it, you will have a better understanding of how WebForms work. The problem with WebForms is there is a lot of magic and about 6 years of trying to make the Web work like Windows Forms, so you have the control tree hierarchy and everything translated to the Web. With MVC you get the core with out the WinForm influence.
So start with MVC, and you will easily be able to move in to WebForms if needed.
I agree with Nick: MVC is much closer to the real web paradigm and by using it you'll be confronted with how your website really works. WebForms astracts most of these things away from you and, coming from a PHP background, I found it really anti-intuitive.
I suggest you directly jump to MVC and skip WebForms. As said, you'll be able to get back to it if needed.
ASP.Net Webforms is a completely different abstraction over the base framework than ASP.NET MVC. With MVC you've got more control over what happens under the covers than with ASP.NET Webforms.
In my opinion learning different ways to do things will usually make you a better programmer but in this case there might be better things to learn.
ASP.NET MVC is for developers who desire to decouple the client code from the server code. I have wanted to write JavaScript, XHTML, CSS clients that can move from server to server (without regard to server technology). Clients are time-consuming to fit and finish so you would want to use them (and sub-components) for as many servers as possible. Also this decoupling allows your server to support any client technology that supports HTTP and angle-brackets (and/or JSON) like WPF/Silverlight. Without ASP.NET MVC you were forced into a hostile relationship with the entire ASP.NET team---but Scott Guthrie is a cool dude and brings MVC to the table after years of his predecessors (and perhaps Scott himself) almost totally focused on getting Windows Forms programmers to write web applications.
Before ASP.NET MVC, I built ASP.NET applications largely based on ASHX files---HTTP handlers. I can assure you that no "real" Microsoft shop would encourage this behavior. It is easier from a (wise) management perspective to dictate that all your developers use the vendor-recommended way of using the vendor's tools. So IT shops that are one or two years behind will require you to know the pre-MVC way of doing things. This also comes in handy when you have a "legacy" system to maintain.
But, for the green field, it's MVC all the way!
It depends on your motivations. If you're going to sell yourself as an ASP.NET developer, you will need both.
If this is just for your own pleasure, then go to MVC.
My personal feeling is that webforms will be around for quite a few years more. So many people have time and energy invested in them. However, I think people will slowly (or maybe not so slowly!) migrate. Webforms was always just a way to get drag-and-drop VB4 morts to think about web development. It kindof worked but it does take away alot of control.
IMO, there are more pitfalls in normal web forms scenarios than with just MVC. Viewstate and databinding can be tricky at times.
But for MVC, it's just plain simple form post/render things old-school way. Not that it is bad, it is just different, and cleaner too.
I can't really speak technically about MVC vs "traditional" as I have only used the traditional model so far. From what I have read though, I don't think one is vastly superior to the other. I think once you "get it", you can be very productive in both.
Practically though, I would take into consideration that most books, code samples and existing applications out there are written for the "traditional" way. You have more help available and your skills will be more useful for employers with existing applications written in the "traditional" way.
If you don't know how or haven't has experience with raw level web request / response and raw html/css rendering then MVC will would be good place to start.
You will then better understand the pros and cons of both webforms and mvc. They will both be around in the future as the both address different needs.
Though I will say webforms is a highly misused and abused platform.
So much of the "look no code" rubbish gives all who use it a bad name.
Put in the time to understand it and use it properly you'll find its a very extensible and robust platform.