Since asp.net mvc did away with many controls that were in webforms, does this make rapid application development equal with other environments now? For example, if I have an mvc framework in php, j2ee, etc., and I have asp.net mvc, and the coder knows the given platform, isn't the development advantage gone in visual studio?
If I am wrong about controls being missing please let me know, it was my impression they were (and I couldn't use them when I tried it last.)
I ask because where I work some like Microsoft - a lot, some can live with it, but the ones that like it point to Visual Studio for rapid development. I thought much of that was gone with asp.net mvc 1.0.
EDIT: I guess I am thinking that dragging and dropping controls means Rapid Application Development (again, assuming the coder knows what they are doing everywhere else.)
Rapid application development is just a buzzword. It exists if you develop an application rapidly, not due to any particular tool or technology.
ASP.NET MVC is just a different approach. Some people can work faster when they are closer to the HTML. For me, this means I don't have to deal with the (IMHO) touchy databinding model of WebForms. Instead, I pass my Model directly to my View for rendering. That lets me develop rapidly. You can still develop your own UserControls (or download many of the ones that are available through open source projects), but you can't use anything that has events or ViewState intrinsic to it.
EDIT: RAD is also a subjective term. Is it rapid application development if you can churn out the first iteration in two weeks, but have to push the schedule back two months for the second iteration because the code was not maintainable?
If you are talking about the ability to drag controls onto a page, click them, set some properties, and have a code generated for you, and a working application by basically dragging controls and tools around, yes, MVC removes the ability to do RAD.
MVC exists to solve a different problem. It is for people that want separation of concerns to support unit testing and extensibility. Things that were nearly impossible to get with classically developed asp.net applications.
Web forms was an attempt to be more RAD if you will. However, the emergence of things like MVC, and Dynamic Data and things like Linq and Linq2SQL are pretty darn good evidence that Web Forms alone were not the panacea RAD platform.
From a personal standpoint, one may be faster at Web forms just by experience. That doesn't mean the platform or it's competitors are better or worse at RAD.
A lot of people found that Web Forms took so much control away and had such large event models that it ended up being less RAD than hoped.
I'd say that Rapid Development and ASP.NET MVC are not mutually exclusive per se. however since MVC has the intent of segregation of responsibility to (amongst others) allow testability, it might not be the best choice for Rapid Development-
On the otherside are ASP.NET Webforms where you can do ALOT "visually"/using drag-n-drop (i.e. no code), which to some extent does a very good job of for example preventing testability. But developing is a "no-brainer" - meant in the most positive way :)
Well, I've never considered Visual Studio as a RAD platform. Faster than PHP, sure. Comparable to Netbeans/Eclipse. Not even close to a true RAD platform though (oh Delphi, how I miss thee!).
Related
I am trying to explain why it's important to use MVC views over Form views within an MVC application. Some of the developers "expedite" work completion by adding form.aspx to the MVC project, technically using MVC but completely avoiding it. I think this is wrong because there isn't a way I know of to do the following things:
Have a route target an older aspx form
Have a controller assemble a model and send it to an older aspx form
Is it wrong to expect the same productivity rate from MVC over older aspx forms?
I would think that a developer that knows both ways of development very well, that the time to create the same solution would be the same (or better) with Asp.net MVC.
Background: We develop website applications used by corporate entities to maintain weekly published data, which could be "yet another customer control panel" to add or change software features about once a month (for each customer, lots of customers, lots of applications, extremely similar patterns).
The time to create an MVC site correctly is in my opinion and experience always going to exceed the time it takes to create one incorrectly. The time advantage to using MVC correctly (or any design pattern for that matter) is not always seen in the initial implementation, it's in the maintainability of the project, whether by the original developer or those who follow. Following good programming practices will result in long term time savings.
In terms of whether a pure MVC project is faster then a pure ASP.net project in terms of time to implement, it seems to me that the expectation could go either way, based on the developers experience, and on the applicability of the project itself to that framework.
I have personally found that for a sizable application that needs much of the 'plumbing' that an MVC app will demand anyway, I am at least as productive with MVC than WebForms.
But there is a learning curve, and a temptation for some 'simple page' to want to just 'throw up' a quick WebForm and be done with it.
I think the biggest gain with MVC, though, is in maintaining the application over time. It should be obvious how much easier it will be to do so with a strict MVC app, than a WebForms one. And adding WebForms into a 'mix' like that just, IMO, makes things even more difficult.
Once you are familiar with the MVC way of development, Its really very useful, scalable & lightweight.
Only initially it takes more time for development compared to Web Forms.
But advantages out number the Web Forms.
Just one of its example:
Its best suited for high traffic sites. In web forms control retains there states, we have view state and all.. During the page post back the whole data is sent back and results retrieved (High load on server). Whereas in Asp.Net MVC the controls are stateless. While posting back the Load on server is less.
like this has many more advantages..
And as it is based on Design Pattern its always good for starters. Who does not have much experience in Developing Applications previously.
With WebForms you can get away with using pre-canned solutions for a lot of things (grids, etc.). With MVC you have to roll your own or use a pre-canned javascript solution which can end up taking more time when compared to WebForms.
So to answer your question: it depends
I am about to start a new project. I would like some indicators to determine if I should use ASP.NET MVC or not.
(Other than experience with ASP.NET MVC...)
What are some indicators that ASP.NET MVC model should be used when starting a project?
What are some indicators that ASP.NET MVC model should not be used when starting a project?
Hm. I thought better about that question, and I guess it would be acceptable to use WebForms if and only if:
Your team members have no idea of web standards, and they prefer to use Visual Studio for developing pages.
You don't care about TDD.
You don't care about object coupling and other "esoteric" SOLID principles.
You miss developing windows applications, and you want that web development be as close as possible of that experience.
You don't care about maximizing performance, or making session-less web applications.
You wanna make it fast and dirty.
If any of the above statements is false, I would recommend you to forget about WebForms and dive into ASP.NET MVC.
Edit:
There is also another reason for NOT using ASP.NET MVC:
You are somehow commited to WebForms (for instance, spent a lot of money on WebForms components or training).
This would invalidate any of the reasons above, unfortunately.
If you want or need testability, definitely go with MVC. That is pretty much the only area of MVC that is almost impossible in Webforms. Other than that it is totally subjective.
Both frameworks are pretty much equally applicable in most areas. In my opinion it comes down to one thing:
Do you prefer to work with a page and component-based framework (Webforms) or an action-based MVC framework (MVC obviously).
In my view Webforms are getting much more bad press than it deserves, and honestly it seems that it is simply come il faut these days to hate Webforms, and love MVC.
Both are simply a tool to reach your target, choose what you like the most. That's it.
I'd generally run with MVC these days. But webforms isn't that bad, and the 4.0 tweaks brings things much more in line with modern web standards and tools. One place they can really shine is intranet apps -- the disadvantages like poor SEO and viewstate either don't matter or become advantages. Drag-n-drop ajax is nice, many developers still do better using the ajax control toolkit over jquery.
On the testability side, I will agree that MVC is a bit more testable in the UI layer, but the meat of your application should be below that waterline. Moreover, there is a fair bit of black magic and voodoo in MVC (DefaultModelBinder anybody?) too. What you really need in both cases is true UI integration tests and they generally don't care either way.
So do what you know and love.
UI COMPLEXITY
The main limitation of the mvc architecture is the absence of viewstate, it don't provide any integrated solution to manage the state of components of UI.
The asp net webfom provide a integrated solution to manage it.
So if you plan to realize UI with many widgets inside, the webform has a builtin solution to archive the problem (at the cost of a more complexity).
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I've been given a short amount of time (~80 hours to start with) to replace an existing Access database with a full-blown SQL + Web system, and I'm enumerating my options. I would like to use ASP.NET MVC, but I'm unsure of how to use it effectively with my short timetable.
For the database backend I'll be using Linq to SQL as it's a product I already know and can get something working with it quickly.
Does anyone have any experience with using ASP.NET MVC in this way and can share some insight?
Edit: The reason I've been interested in ASP.NET MVC is because I know (100% confirmed) that there will be more work to do after this first round, and I'd like my maintenance work to be as easy as possible. In my experience Webforms applications tend to break down over repeated maintenance, despite discipline.
Maybe there's a middle ground? How difficult would it to be for me to, say, build the app with Webforms, then migrate it to MVC later when I have more time budgeted to the project?
Edit 2: Further background: the Access application I'm replacing is used in some capacity by everyone in the building, and since it was upgraded from Access 98 to 2003 it's been crashing daily, causing hours of lost productivity as people have to re-enter data since the last backup. This is the reason for the short amount of time - this is a critical business function, and they can't afford to keep re-entering data on a daily basis.
There really are no good answers.
I'd be very surprised if you could recreate a non-trivial business application in a new format (web) in any 'short' amount of time (unless you measure 'short' to be 6 months).
ASP.NET MVC provides (hands down) the most convention available with any beginning web project.
ASP.NET lets you drag-and-drop to get things working, but it breaks maintenance horribly for non-trivial applications.
If it were me, I'd do three things:
Ask my boss if he wants me to recreate an entire business application across a completely different platform.
Tell him he can either have it more quickly now (ASP.NET), or more quickly later (ASP.NET MVC).
Let him make the call.
Personal Addendum: I've used both ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC for web applications. MVC is just better. Not faster, but better. It made web development 'fun' again for me.
MVC isn't really a RAD development framework.
You'll be writing much more infrastructure code than the RAD Webforms alternative of dragging a datagrid and a datasource onto a .aspx page. I love MVC but if you're under the gun go with Webforms. MVC can be faster, but only if you have infrastructure pre-built.
MVC 2 alleviates some of this by including Model based HTML helpers like Model.EditorFor() but it's not good enough yet. No quick grid code. Paging? You're rolling your own pager. Ajax? Write your own JQuery.
Sure, there are 3rd party and open source libraries available for all this stuff but in my experience smushing them all together and making sure they play nice is also time consuming.
Simple web application + tight schedule = ASP.NET webforms.
Complex web application + tight schedule = ASP.NET MVC.
I've found that as the complexity of a web app increases linearly the complexity of a webforms app increases exponentially. Once you start writing your own server controls (NOT user controls, as those are still relatively simple), which can be necessary for more complex UI, you need to have an intimate knowledge of the whole page lifecycle, how the viewstate works, and other obscure parts of webforms that the framework abstracts from you.
MVC, while it requires you know HTML well, does great on the tail end of complexity. No matter how complex the application is, you're still dealing with POCOs and methods in your controller. Once you get over the initial hurdles, its smooth sailing. Development difficulty increases at the same pace as website difficulty.
Personal experience: I converted a relatively complex website using custom server controls to ASP.NET MVC and cut the codebase in half. I also drastically reduced the complexity of the code as well.
The only caveat I have is that ajax is easier to do using ASP.NET AJAX. So if you're going to develop a web app that relies heavily on ajax then webforms may just beat MVC.
Migrating from ASP.NET to MVC isn't always the easiest. You have to move from a codebehind-based application to one where your controllers are unaware of your UI. Also, MVC relies heavily on the URL to determine the intent of the user, whereas ASP.NET relies on event handlers.
Personally, if I felt an application was destined to be MVC, I wouldn't waste time developing it in ASP.NET. But then, I've had the benefit of getting past the initial learning curve. Which wasn't all that bad IMHO. I had more trouble learning all the HTML and HTML forms that ASP.NET kept me from learning.
With this deadline i think it's more convenient to use the ASP.Net Webform. After this first phase with more time/budget you can start to develop new parts of your application using the MVC since they can coexist.
Also be aware of the Ajax and grid code. In MVC they usually take longer to develop but also at least for me they appear to be more robust because you really have to know what you're doing.
This question is from 2009, would be nice if the author give some feedback of his decision.
EDIT: Take a look into http://mvcscaffolding.codeplex.com/ if you still need a RAD using asp.net MVC.
Once you get running with MVC, it's pretty quick, but it takes a while a) to learn and b) to build up a suite of useful bits of code.
If your UI is not going to be complicated, it can be very easy to set up a quick data entry interface.
If your UI is to be really, really simple, you might like to look at ASP.net dynamic data.
You can also look the Entity Framework to bind to your database, this will create your models to be used with MVC. But Like jfar said, under short deathline pressure, go for what you know best!
ASP.Net MVC is good, but ....
If you haven't developed a system using ASP.Net MVC before, then using it on a project with a short deadline is a risk.
If your application is a "simple" CRUD application then I would go with Dynamic Data: http://www.asp.net/dynamicdata/
(Paddy just beat me to that one)
If your system is really big you could consider SharePoint Access Services http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2009/10/21/net-developer-blogs-about-access-2010.aspx
Evolutionary Software Development
From experience I vouch for it - it's how I program, it works regardless of technology.
In short: do what your gut-feel tells you (code something), modify as you find errors/omissions, and when it works, you're done (but for the documentation).
Another option is to use Alpha Five v10 --
It recently received a thumbs up from Infoworld
check out http://blog.alphasoftware.com/search/label/Press%20coverage
Both frameworks contribute enough in delivering a solution, but WebForms automate some of tasks involved in UI functionality, like data paging, sorting, state persistence or custom data persistence and more, BUT... if you really sit down and say, ok what do i need to do? ... design, navigate, modelize, present and then figure out how to show layout, how to connect to data, how to bring data, how to bind them with UI, how to paginate, sort and finally edit, really put your mind down and compare techinques in each framework that accomplishes all that, you will know that MVC is more natural and team oriented. You need tools like EF Code First, a CSS framework like Bootstrap and jQuery, apply techniques like IoC, SoC, Layering etc and use for example Automapper for doing the boring stuf, but no matter how many things you will have to consider, it will always be match more easy, natural and direct than having to know all the various configuration of the numerous controls and managers that WebForms require. Except if your project is an ERP with CMS capabilities where ... you know :-)
Anyway, modern skils require to adapt in today's trends and MVC is just a good host to help you use them without suprises.
I ve written tons of WebForms code but i am not touching it again.
So, final point is that in 2014 with all those tools and frameworks out there, MVC is not slower but rather the opposite, but requires an initial, small to me, efford to gather some resources and lock a few methodologies.
Simple as it is :
Why to move to Asp.NET MVC & why not to move ( if there is any reason ) ?
Added
Is it a necessity to move ?
Can we say the future belongs to asp.net mvc ?
How many years do you think it can stays on top ?
MVC is much more well constructed, allowes for much better code seperation and control over markup, and is much lighter on the server, that IMHO the only reason not to move is if you have a legacy .NET application (or other) that is working flawlessly, and you're not expected to perform serious adjustments / fixes on it in the near future.
If you do decide to move, you should know that you'll be able to reuse very little of your webforms GUI and user controls, since MVS is built a bit differently. You class libraries you could reuse, if they're written well. In any case, writing stuff in MVC is much faster than in WebForms, even if done from scratch.
also looking at moving at the moment.
the main bonus for me is the complete control over layout. i'm also looking into implementing a restful API which the MVC model works very nicely with because of the path structure.
Josh
If we move for MVC we can add or edit any module so easyly.
So we can add any new module just like a plugin
I patrially disagree with the accepted answer. I have built large applications in both WebForms and MVC and here is my opinion:
ASP.Net Web Forms and ASP.Net MVC are both great frameworks that allow the C#/VB Net developer to build enterprise level applications. Choosing which one to use for your app depends on a few factors. The MVC model has been around for many years, it is well suited if you need more fine-tuned control over the page cycle process and it is also superior when it comes to unit testing etc, because it supports true separation of business logic and presentation layers.
However, do not dismiss Web Forms, the reality is you can continue to use the web forms framework and still have tight control over your page elements be simply moving away from pre-built server controls and integrating HTML5 standard controls. You can take advantage of new JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, you can improve search engine friendliness by using techniques like URL Re-Write, and you can reduce or eliminate post-backs by taking advantage of asynchronous frameworks like jQuery AJAX and SignalR.
The main reason I disagree with the accepted answer is the statement "writing stuff in MVC is much faster than in WebForms" is completely inaccurate. As any developer who has actually built MVC apps will tell you, it's actually much fast to build WebForms apps. The reason is not just learning curve, but the fact that while MVC gives you the benefit of "under-the-hood" access to the page cycle and more direct access to HTML output, is also the reason it takes longer to build MVC apps. Trust me, you will find yourself doing much more "plumbing" work than you ever did with "drag-and-drop" WebForms development.
The fact is, there was a lot of hype when ASP.Net MVC first came out and too many developers assumed it was a replacement for Web Forms. It hasn't. As I stated in the beginningm both frameworks are great, they both have their pros and cons. I would guess that 90% of developers are still building new apps in WebForms.
That's my 2c.
Just a random question. I've been in internship and then working as a software designer for almost a year now, mainly with SQL Server 2005 / 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 with ASP.Net VB / C#, web software development. We recently started a project with ASP.Net MVC, and I just don't get this stuff.
The concept of Views, Controllers, Models etc is clear. I'm still a bit confused with some of the syntax, but it doesn't seem impossible to get. My problem however, is with all the basic controls and functions you had with basic ASP.Net. Want a dropdownlist? Go browse through 15 tutorials one of which may actually work. How about a gridview with editable rows? Manually build the tables or helper classes with loads and loads of code also built from several different tutorials. What about panels or multiview indexes to easily control the visible user-interface on a page? Well, go learn another tutorial about how to do it all from scratch. Etc..
I do not argue the idea that MVC is worth it. It has to be, with so many people smarter and more experienced than I am saying so. But I've now fought with this beast for over a month and am getting increasingly frustrated at having to use hours to days of time to do the most basic tasks that were easy even when I was barely beginning with the whole programming thing almost a year ago.
So my question. Are there others out there like me? Are there perhaps nice blogs or articles opening all this up to people like myself? Is ASP.Net MVC just something that is so hardcore advanced that you NEED to have extensive experience and talent to actually master it?
Thanks for your time.
It's not for advanced developers. It is for good developers.
Most ASP.NET WebForms developers have made it somehow through years without having a slightest idea of HTML, CSS, JavaScript or HTTP. Drag and drop some control, set up some properties and here you go. It is not the way of a professional. You need to know the basics. It is only a matter of time until some situation arrives where a standard control cannot help and you need to work around the postback mechanism, viewstate etc.
I agree that it is definitely more work trying to implement an editable data grid, add persistance for controls, add some nice Ajax effects instead of relying on UpdatePanels, yes. But you really need to know this stuff if you wish to be working as web developer.
What you are experiencing is being overwhelmed at once by all those things you should have learned already but have managed to postpone thanks to very well done abstraction mechanism of WebForms. The best course of action is to start learning these things now, step by step. It will likely take you at least 6 months of intensive studies to feel more or less confident with doing stuff manually. But when you have done this, you will be looking back at your start and feeling glad you did it.
I was trying to work out what the problem was with MVC until I grasped the essential difference between the person asking the question and me - it would be this, I first laid hands to keyboard in 1979 whereas Zan has been "working as a software designer for almost a year now".
When I started one more or less had to do everything (at least in terms of presenting a UI) from scratch - or at least using far more limited toolkits than is the case today. The notion of constructing a drop down list by running a loop to create the options is in some respects considerably less alien to me than binding a datasource to a control and having the result appear as if by magic (notwithstanding 9 years of VB.OLD and over 6 years of .NET and C#)
And that is the core difference between Forms and MVC as it currently stands - the way you produce the presentation code and consequently the fact that you need to understand HTML and do seemingly more work to achieve similar results (and this is one of the reasons that people keep emphasising, quite rightly, that MVC is NOT an appropriate solution for every project). In terms of the structure of an application - MVC encourages a better (more testable) style but its not the only means to achieve that end - the majority of the techniques are as applicable using forms and alternative patterns.
And again this raises the challenge of contemporary frameworks and tools - they do a huge amount of work for you (go look at Dynamic Data for example) but they also hide so much from you that we lose track of the fundamentals and of an understanding of the basic building blocks from which our complex applications are constructed. In this case the problem sounds like one I've had which is learning about the nuts and bolts how a web page is actually constructed (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and how it interacts with the server as opposed to just having the whole client experience automagically generated for you.
MVC is no more a tool for "good developers" than Forms is - rather its a good tool for developers that wish to achieve a particular result albeit one that comes with a price just as forms is also a good tool but with different outcomes because you're accepting a different set of compromises.
A good developer is one that can adapt - can learn the new techniques necessary to work on a different platform, to target new environments, to use appropriate solutions for a particular task and ultimately that can apply solid patterns and methodologies to their work in so far as is possible whatever the dev environment...
i also spend one year on mvc what i learn till now is u can rely on client side as much as u can but in classic asp.net most of time u used server side controls like gridview. In asp.net mvc u can replace it with jquery controls like jQgrid and jquery datatable. you must have to spend some time to learn asp.net mvc the it might looks u better then asp.net classic.
for reference read asp.net mvc pro book
MVC is not a new concept; in fact other languages have this kind of framework long before Microsoft got it. Think about Ruby On Rails, Zend Framework, Symfony etc.
If you say that MVC is for the hardcore and the alpha geeks, then by your logic other language developers are much more advanced than .Net developers. I don't think this is true.
Your problem with MVC stems from your webform background; ASP.Net and ASP.NET MVC greatly differ in terms of concepts and approach. So some unfamiliarity is expected for those who are moving from one framework into another. Me, on the other hand, who has no webform experience ( although I do have winform experience), don't find MVC hard to grasp.
And I don't think I am smarter than anyone else.
All i can suggest is that you need to do more of it! The more you practise, the more it will become clear. That's how it was for me. I was fundamentally stumped by the MVC concept to start with but after much frustration i just decided i would need to force myself to start using it or i'd never get it.
I'd recommend actually completing one or two of the tutorials found on the asp.net/mvc site from start to finish. I can personally recommend the NerdDinner (and the book from which this example was birthed - Pro ASP.NET MVC 1.0) and Storefront tutorials.
ASP.NET MVC is built on top of bunch of old concepts - HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And so on. The whole point is to bring their power directly to your hands. If you can't handle this power - for example, you're not familiar with HTTP statelesness, or how to build rich pages with HTML/CSS/JS - you can't do much with ASP.NET MVC.
If you say that you're in programming for only one year then you're most probably not familiar with those concepts and that's the problem, not in the MVC itself.
Maybe you take ASP.NET MVC as a refinement of ASP.NET. That's wrong. They're VERY different. Imagine yourself doing web development with only HTML, CSS, and jQuery [1]... can you? If you can't then you will have troubles doing MVC.
I personally worked with ASP.NET for couple of years, and ASP.NET MVC was a breath of fresh air. It's just so much simpler and cleaner.
[1] This can be done, for example with data fed via web services.
MVC is great but the argument that it makes you happy by finally giving you the power of HTML, CSS and Javascript is real crap. The same logic would say: code in pure SQL and forget nHibernate or Linq. Why is abstraction bad? I like MVC but please don't use such arguments. MVC needs something to be able to build complex rich user interfaces (which are browser compatible).
Finally, on HTML, CSS and Javascript. The fact that MVC forces you to go back to the basics does in now way mean that the developers do it right. Whether you use web forms or MVC, a bad JS developer stays a bad JS developer (and same for HTML or CSS).
Sometimes it is better to not give too much power to the weaker developers in a team.