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.
Related
Most web frameworks are still using the traditional action based MVC model. A controller recieves the request, calls the model and delegates rendering to a template. That is what Rails, Grails, Struts, Spring MVC ... are doing.
The other category, the component based frameworks like Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, or ASP.Net Web Forms have become more popular over the last years, but my perception is that the traditional action based approach is far more popular. And even ASP .Net Web Forms has become a sibling name ASP .Net Web MVC. Edit: Maybe my perception was wrong because of the impression of increasing interest in Wicket. If I ask Google Trends, there is much more growth in the tradional MVC frameworks.
I think the kind of applications built with both types of frameworks is overlapping very much, so the question is: Why are action based frameworks so predominant?
the component based frameworks like
Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, or ASP.Net Web
Forms have become more popular over
the last years
[Citation Needed]?
I seriously doubt this claim. MVC has taken over the .Net blog/twitter sphere. Its really hard to find somebody saying "we'll use webforms for our next project".
MVC fits the stateless nature of the web better. Component frameworks are an abstraction web developers didn't want.
Why are things more popular? They are several reasons: because of a good user experience, fast development cycle, cheapest things, etc
But sometimes
the loudest
or most hyped (rails, although it is great ;-))
or most arrogant (apple)
or the things with the most aggressive marketing (microsoft)
will win.
That is called evolution.
BTW: I am with Thevs. The component based frameworks will be the final winners (like GWT/Vaadin or wicket).
Inertia. Once you've invested a lot in one technology, it becomes progressively more difficult to change to something better. And it is not 10 times better, because then everyone (even the CEO) would have seen the change is needed.
I believe it's because action-based frameworks give developers (and designers) more control over the appearance of the page. Component-based frameworks try (unsuccessfully, IMHO) to hide the fact that the web is the web. They try to make web programming something like programming a native desktop widget toolkit like WinForms or Cocoa.
But the web is very, very different from that. I think action-based frameworks are popular because they recognize this.
EDIT
Apparently some people have misunderstood what I mean by this, so let me be clear. I'm NOT criticizing web application that appears to users to function like a desktop application. I have absolutely no problem with that.
What I'm talking about is the underlying coding methodology and philosophy. Each tag in a tag library system renders HTML in a certain way, analogous to a widget in a desktop programming library like Cocoa or WinForms. Some systems allow you to customize the rendered HTML, but this can sometimes be non-trivial to accomplish. It will render CSS classes and so on over which you either have little control or have to make a special effort to control. It pretends to be a black-box solution, but it cannot possibly be, because if you want to style the rendered HTML or target it with JavaScript, you have to understand its structure and so on.
I suspect that developers are using MVC frameworks as a simple way of exposing services, not as action-based web app frameworks (this is pure speculation on my part). i.e. they are using them for AJAX requests. I would predict that the concept of action-based frameworks quietly goes away over the next couple of years, along with (to some extent) the concept of MVC in this context.
I think you only see these frameworks showing all around. But most programmers use in-house (custom) or much more simple framework models (like ExtJS or JQuery) and silently do their job.
EDIT: By the way, I think MVC model is trying to mimc the old and probably obsolete business/presentation separation model which was proposed for legacy applications some time ago.
I see no future for this model (2-3 years from now). AJAX is already changing all the way you're working with backend.
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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.
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It seems to me like there's a lot of sheeping going on, with everyone jumping on the MVC bandwagon.
Almost everyone is declaring WebForms as evil and satan without much persuasion. Then they go on to say that Controls are evil and they shouldn't be in a Web app. How are you going to show anything without any controls?
I remember when WebForms first came out and everybody loved them. I guess in a few years, people will sheep on to the next thing and declare MVC evil because you had to actually create controls to use MVC and they'll say you have to develop an application and not worry about the controls.
The way I see it MVC can be achieved in WebForms by not including the RunAt in the Form tag.
Then if you want to retrieve data, just use Ajax.
Can someone persuade me on why I should use MVC and not WebForms?
You shouldn't arbitrarily decide between one or the other; don't plump for the MVC framework just because it's the new kid on the block and everyone's singing its praises, especially not if you're comfortable with doing things using Web Forms. Practically every existing system is going to be using the older, more established technology, and there's nothing wrong with that.
While it's true that the MVC framework does allow for even easier separation of concerns (after all, that's what the MVC pattern is for), it also brings with it the responsibility of writing more HTML, and I think a slightly greater understanding of how the web works; not necessarily an unreasonable requirement, but you could argue it'll slightly slow you down the first few times you set about using it.
To be honest, I agree that Web Forms takes a lot of undeserved flack. Granted, there's a lot of magic going on in the background, and you get less control over some of the HTML output, but it's not exactly impossible to style with CSS (you end up using !important a lot, perhaps), and it's also not impossible to get some separation of concerns, even if it doesn't meet the purist's view of what that might be. You can still write pretty horrible code using the MVC framework. If you're looking to throw together something quickly, and you're good with Web Forms, then you're going to be able to achieve that very quickly, and it's nothing to be ashamed of, is it?
That's not to say, of course, that you should stick to your guns and ignore MVC either; it's a good framework (in fact, it's a very good framework) and it does confer several benefits which you might want to take advantage of in the long run. You also have to remember that it doesn't automatically nullify everything you learned about ASP.NET 2.0, either; a lot of the supporting architecture is embraced in the MVC framework, including things like the membership providers.
In Webforms:
Both Viewstate and Postbacks have been made lot of problems and increased complexity of the web application development. Many web pages having hundreds of KB size of Viewstate that affected the performance of the applications sometime.
Developers do not have the control of the rendering HTML of web forms and Server controls that render html with mixed inline style and deprecated tags that does not follows standards.
The page life cycle of the Web Form is too complex and has the tightly coupling between all things in the ASP.net framework and a single class is used both to display output and handles user input.
Unit testing is almost an impossible task. Today unit testing is very important in modern software development especially when we following agile methodologies and practices. Since web is a stateless thing, Events, Postbacks and Viewstate are not a good way.
With asp.net MVC all these things are simplified
If these things don't apply to you and you enjoy using Webforms then stick with what you do best. Don't try to fix something thats not broken.
For more detail refer to : Shiju's blog of ASP.net MVC Vs ASP.net Web Form
I see the key advantages of MVC as:
Much cleaner and simpler architecture. No more guessing which event you have handle to hook up your data correctly. No more having to insert a hook to "fix" a data binding problem because the framework doesn't do exactly what you want.
The framework doesn't get your way as much.
Decoupled architecture makes much more of the code more easily tested.
More closely aligned with the architecture of the web. For people coming from a WebForms background this may not seem to be an advantage until you embrace it and design for it instead of trying to write WebForms-like applications in MVC. Fortunately, I had explored Ruby on Rails some before using ASP.NET MVC and had already started to write my WebForms apps in a more RESTful way.
History/Ubiquity -- despite the fact that Microsoft is just rolling it out, MVC is a well-known and highly respected pattern. It's widely used for lots of web applications in many frameworks. Learning MVC will give you a leg up if you need to switch to a different technology where they are also doing MVC -- say RoR or Java/Struts.
The disadvantages:
Microsoft's implementation is new and not as mature.
Few third-party "controls"/plugins for round-trip use -- generic grids and such, though there are lots of plugins on the client-side via jQuery.
Requires unlearning some paradigms from WebForms to effectively use it.
The framework doesn't do as much heavy lifting for you; you'll have to learn some Javascript and write more client-side code because the framework won't inject it for you.
WebForms is a great framework, but it does requires for you to dig in and understand it. And yes, you should still be an expert in HTML and JavaScript. Every complaint that I ever hear about WebForms comes from someone who didn't take time to understand WebForms. Here are my answers to a few of them.
ViewState is Evil and will slow down the page
This reminds me of the programmers who made everything a global variable. You can certainly do it, but you SHOULD NOT! It's the same with WebForms and ViewState. Don't use ViewState unless you need to, and then only sparingly. There is nothing wrong in adding 1000 characters of view state to the html, if it will bring better user experience and/or speed up development time. You can experience the same problem in MVC by littering the page with hundreds of hidden input controls, and yes I've seen it. And by the way, ViewState is not "magical" it simply stores some data in a single input control and also encrypts it for good measure.
WebForms generates "ugly" html and is littered with long ids
Well, first of all, nobody actually looks at generated hmtl (did you look at google.com for example, it's a mess?!). Second, if you really care about generating specific html, it takes less than an hour to create your own re-usable component or control, with html of your choosing. Or you can take existing control, override rendering and use that control instead. Once again, you have to know where to go and how to do it, but once you know, it will be a great productivity boost without any sacrifices. Long ids are automatically generated to ensure uniqueness across the page. If you ever get a chance to develop a complex MVC view, you'll notice that you will inventing your own long id pattern, so that you can parse the form fields correctly on posting.
WebForms disallows multiple forms per page
I've been developing for 10 years and only once did I need multiple forms. And then I figured out that I didn't. You do have to understand HTTP requests and responses and how to achieve them with WebForms, but if you do, you'll never need multiple forms, nor will you ever think about "forms" at all.
WebForms pages are not testable
Absolutely not true. Even if you don't like MVP (which I don't), there are other techniques to test anything you want to test. It is true that if you just use pages in WebForms as is and put all logic in code-behid, it's probably not going to be testable and it's not a good idea. However, just like in MVC or Windows Forms applications, you can and you should, at least for complex views, create intermediary layers such as views and controllers. I prefer encapsulating functionality into user controls which implement an interface or inherit a base class. Then the page on which user controls reside on acts like a "master controller". Individual views, or user controls in this case, can be tested because they all implemement an interface or base class.
JavaScript is hard to do in WebForms
JavaScript is actually easier to implement in WebForms than in MVC. You sure have more options! But once again, you have to know WebForms well in order to realise this. In WebForms you can "inject" javacript with reusable components and controls. Or you can use it just like in MVC or plain HTML after changing a setting on the page to keep ASP implementing id naming scheme.
Having said all this, what does WebForms have to offer that MVC does not? Encapsulation and reusability of presentation components is by far the biggest, in my opinion. For complex views, I develop individual components (server or user controls) and than a custom controller or presentation factory weaves all of them into place. Additionally, design-time html is far cleaner in WebForms than in MVC, making design and styling a lot easier for properly trained graphic designers. It's cleaner because there is no programming code in design-time html, only markup (I don't use data binding expressions). And of course prototyping is much much easier in WebForms. For prototypes I will normally ignore all of the best practices and resort to wizards and ugly code-behind code that hits the database directly.
I could go on, but the main point I'd like to make is that WebForms and MVC are very different patterns and require different sets of knowledge and mindset to deliver great solutions. Both require as much of Web/HTTP/CSS knowledge as you can get. If I had to make one recommendation, generally, but not always, for high-traffic public website (such as blog) I may lean towards MVC. For complex web application, either internal/Intranet or membership external/Internet application, I would lean towards WebForms.
WebForms work fine and if you like them, continue to use them.
Three of the big advantages to MVC model as I see it are:
ViewState is gone, which could create a fairly sizable amount of traffic over the wire.
URLs can be remapped to mean something as is all the rage now.
Scaffolding. I don't know, personally I think this is satan and encourages terrible programming habits, but other seem to think its a beautiful idea.
It also encourages a a proper separation between business logic and presentation by enforcing the Model-View-Controller pattern, but good WebForm code can mostly do that as well.
So, really, if you are fine with the overhead of WebForms, and ok with ugly URLs and don't want scaffolding, stick with WebForms.
EDIT: Oh, I did miss one major advantage of "clean" urls. And MVC application is much friendlier for SEO. It also gives you fine control over HTML, but frankly, I don't consider that much of a step forward.
I think part of the problem, is that many people don't realise that MVC isn't an M$ invention, nor is it a replacement for webforms. Certainly, people like "new" things, and people like to throw buzzwords around, particularly to improve their resumes...
Finally .NET developers have some choice, and with that choice, they are being thrust some degree of responsibility for the decisions they make. I'm not surprised many webforms developers are nervous about this responsibility. It's not been there before. Ultimately, it can make you a better developer, or a worse one. It's now up to you.
People loved webforms, because it was better than ASP (Classic). And yes, in 5 - 10 years, I'm sure someone/group much smarter than I, will evolve a new paradigm/pattern.
Be careful with the sheep lable, as in a way, by holding onto a vendor specific pattern (webforms) you are potentially a bigger "sheep".
MVC is now across a variety of platforms, and means your potential to develop meaningful and stable solutions to problems can be dramatically increased. Or decreased. It's ultimately up to you. If you're not ready to go, then wait for ASP.NET MVC to mature. But don't close your mind to anything, particularly a pattern that is very very well established!
I recommend reading Rob Connery's extremely inflammatory blog. He certainly strummed my pain with his fingers! Then go and read RoR stuff, Cake, and Struts. All of these will start showing you the vision that the guys who brought MVC to .NET have (~ish) and hopefully will inspire you to see problems differently!
There have been several, more detailed, answers here, so rather than repeat anything they have said I'll try to keep my answer a bit more succinct. You shouldn't, necessarily use MVC over webforms, just as you shouldn't use webforms over MVC - they are both tools and are more, or less, appropriate in different situations. I was first exposed to MVC quite a few years ago on J2EE, when .NET was first coming out (I'm not sure the ASP.NET MVC was available at that time). It gives a really nice, clean framework and gives more "web" applications (i.e. request/response), but you can also add in a lot more client-side functionality using AJAX - I have done some really funky things using AJAX on a php app I wrote a while ago and that is all usable under MVC.
There are some things that MVC does better and some things that webforms do better, but if you don't know both technologies you can't choose the best one for the current project you are doing, so please don't do yourself a disservice - go and learn MVC. Even if you never use it directly, it may still give you useful "theory" knowledge you can apply in other tools. I try to learn as many different things as I can, as the more strings to my bow I have, the less likely it is that I will not be able to solve a problem (for example, in that php app, I used php, hooked into a bit of ASP, and even had DOS and *NIX batch/script files performing certain functions - each tool had its place and was best suited to the job to which it was allocated).
Not me. MVC is pretty cool in a resume, but for our customers (those who pay for our work), it's not a show stopper.
They usually want applications that are right, fast and secure. That's all. They will not want to change the third layer of the client part in three years ! In three years, they will change every thing or nothing at all.
Layers are fun to architect and to code, but they cost a lot to create and to maintain and they are not relevant to our customers. MVC is pretty cool but really useless and expensive.
Unless, of course, you are developping applications for 4 OS and 3 plateforms... But you will then be a minority.
:o)
This is a stupid discussion - they are different, ASP.NET MVC and WebForms are different technologies! I'm using MVC for all new projects, but when I am faced with a need for RAD I use WinForms, because it is simple and there are a lot of controls already written by gurus.
Stop discussing this. Who wants to understand difference? Just try both technologies and you will understand by yourself.
Last week , my boss ask my team to evaluate ASP.NET MVC, for next project.
all of us working with webform since .NET 1.1, we have no MVC experience before ,but all of my colleagues are interested in ASP.NET MVC ,But no luck , our finally answer is NO.
Because:
We believe although you are ASP.NET Guru, you can build a complex application in short amount of time. But if you change to ASP.NET MVC, the development time will take longer, every things need to using html helper, no web control, and many question ,keep opening the Firefox Tab with ASP.NET forum for ask How-To question.
We had see many times people say MVC provide better project management , but if it is a complex web site, I can imagine there are hundred <%=%> TAGs in one page, and keep open controller to see what to return, and keep opening model to see the logic.
I can say , MVC is not bad, but Webform is strong enough to handle the job.
It will take several weeks to change over to a new technology, or a "way of thinking".
With MVC, you have to get away from old ASP.NET Forms way of thinking "complex web application" in that "how many pages we have, over 300 pages! that would be huge!". You change the view of your entire application. You shift from old thinking of "what page need to create next" to the MVC way of thinking of "what function do we need to implement next".
For example, I myself took control of a project that has over 3300 files in the 'web' project alone (plus the 11 supporting assemblies). One thing that I am architecting is how MVC will drastically cut down the number of physical files down to around 310 or so. How? Because I am moving away from "here's one page. Here's another page." to a "here's the function I want to implement" way of thinking.
By looking at pages as the function you are trying to accomplish, you instead start abstracting pieces of that page out into common functionality.
MVC can greatly scale with this way-of-thinking because now you have a template for the way you want it to look, you just need to implement another "function" to change the look of that View (html) you want to render. No 2nd page, no additional controls, etc.
Now, as for "no web controls" as you mentioned: again, this calls for a different way of thinking. There is the HtmlHelper that is used for basic rendering and encoding. I use the same concept with an abstracted class called MyProjectHelper that renders my "functions" onto the page (functions=code).
For example, I always created a Server Control for my DisplayNames in the past. This allowed me to control the way that DisplayName was shown, especially with a switch to Facebook Connect and other things. With MVC, I no longer use a "server control", but a "function" on a ViewModel to render that text: CollegeProjectViewModel.RenderDisplayName(). Since this is only part of the UI layer, this will render the Anchor as needed with any options I wish (of course, the abstract is inherited by the CollegeProjectViewModel that picks up on the "basic" text rendering).
MVC's power lies in the ability to no longer require a "webpage", but instead "functions" or methods of what you want to do with your site. By changing to this way of thinking, you really can scale with as many method you create on your Controllers. It really speeds things up on a mass scale IMO.
I worked on a MVC project at my last company for 6 months (we were using the CTP builds and eventually the beta builds). Initially, it was fun and exciting and it felt like we were really on to something. Like a lot of .NET developers out there, we were tired of the leaky abstractions of Web Forms.
However, as time progressed, we started to question our decision. The UI development was taking like 80% + of our time. We had to build all our UI from the ground up. Half the time it felt like we were reinventing the wheel. Most of our Rich UI came from JQuery combined with Custom HTML Helpers, which were fun to design, but time consuming.
There were other problems we were encountering, like the necessity of DTO-like objects to map from our business objects (fetched from a repository backed by NHibernate) to the Views. And our controllers, which were apparently supposed to be lightweight and easy to maintain, were becoming increasingly cluttered and we were constantly arguing about the proper way to implement controller inheritance.
In retrospect, I feel all the problems we were facing were due to our lack of experience and understanding of MVC. We all liked the idea of MVC, but just didn't have the practical experience and know-how to use it effectively on what I consider to be a very complex (imagine something along the lines of Sales Force, but with better reporting) application.
-- UPDATE --
Been using it the last month to work on a very small project and so far things are going smoothly. It's much easier to work with than the CTP versions I was using a year ago. I am currently looking at my own personal solution for complex "grid views", and then I might switch over completely for most projects. However, Dynamic Data has been treating me proper and I am sort of torn between the 2.
-- UPDATE 2011 --
After several various sized MVC projects over the past year or so, I have become somewhat of a convert. All the real issues I had with it have mostly been resolved in the latest versions (2 & 3), particularly the ones dealing with model validation and binding to and from views.
One thing though: it still can be a bit tedious to create highly interactive data grids, something that is still somewhat easier in WebForm. However, there are 3rd party offering that provide useful MVC extensions making this less of a concern. Personally, I use Telerik's offerings to great ends.
Among many benefits to using MVC is the removal of the viewstate hog.
If your Webform app is really large and uses a lot of server-side items that bloat your line with viewstate, then MVC may actually help you, even though it may take longer to develop.
On the flip side of that, be on the lookout for .NET v4.0 which will allow you to control viewstate on the control level instead of just on the page level. That will make MVC even less palatable overall.
I think you're right that it will take your team time to adapt to the new technology, and this will take extra time in the short term.
I wouldn't start using MVC in production until are some decent books out and the team has had a chance to read the books and play with the technology. Otherwise it seems your dev team will spend a lot of time watching screencasts and fishing for documentation.
I came from webform development (just like you), from 1.0 up until 3.5. When I discovered MVC (CTP), it took me about 6 months to convince my peers (and my boss) that it is the way to go.
Some of the highlights of my arguments:
Full control of HTML
TRUE AJAX (instead of update panel)
Possibility of using jQuery exponentially increased
No VIEWSTATE
Separation of concern
.. and .. (drum roll) ... faster development
Although #6 is a little bit subjective, but I did try to prove it by building prototypes. For my prototype, I built a simple dashboard web app, using both webform and asp.net mvc. I showed my peers and my boss the result, as well as the complexity of building and maintaining each one. In the end, we migrate our main methodology from webform to MVC.
It is true that it takes a while to "unlearn" some webform paradigm. But once you get it, MVC is so much easier to pick up and you can run with it.
In webform, yes it is powerful, but often in large projects, we spend a lot of our time trying to "customizing" or "coercing" a server control to behave and perform like the way we want it - and as complexity of the system goes up, the complexity of this customization also goes up exponentially.
TRUE AJAX is also quite difficult in webform. UpdatePanel has its role, but nested update panels has its own share of problems as well.
For me and my peers, it boils down to the ability to control our HTML/code/AJAX - instead of automatically generated 90% by the framework but we have to spend a lot of time and effort to get the rest 10%.
ASP.NET MVC, combined with jQuery, and your prefered biz tier framework or ORM, is extremely powerful. So far to date, we have released 3 production releases with ASP.NET MVC and they all perform well - heck take a look at stackoverflow.com (it uses MVC btw).