Am I Losing Out By Not Using Mvc

There are a tremendous amount of ASP.NET web forms developers out there who confess that they simply don't understand ASP.NET MVC. In a lot of ways, I can relate with them. The vocal community that speaks about ASP.NET MVC talk about it with such zeal that they make it sound like you'd have to be a twit not to move over. In reality, the verdict isn't nearly as straightforward.

ASP.NET web forms aren't going anyplace. These tactics have their right place in a web developer's toolbox and it's essential to recognize their strengths and weak points. In general, the ASP.NET MVC framework is likely to give up ease-of-use (e.g. viewstate, validation, etc.) in order to supply developers more restrictive control over the reins. This can be a superb thing, but only if you take advantage of it. Otherwise it can just as readily be a issue.

With all of this, I have established a rapid metric to establish if ASP.NET MVC is appropriate for you. The way I see it, there are three primary motives a developer should choose the ASP.NET MVC framework over ASP.NET web forms. If none of these factors are persuasive to you, then you should stick with ASP.NET web forms:

To Gain Control and Extensibility

As indicated out in the remarks, ASP.NET MVC allows you more control and extensibility options than ASP.NET web forms. You get complete control over the page request lifecycle and the means to exchange out several key parts of the framework (e.g. view engine, routing, etc.), none of which is attainable with ASP.NET web forms.

In addition to this, you also acquire complete control over the delivered HTML. In general, the rendered HTML from ASP.NET web forms applications is terrible. The web controls it utilizes create nonsense ids and invisible fields galore that not only impede the performance of a site, but also make CSS styling and Javascript development a pain. ASP.NET MVC causes you to be more in tune with your HTML. There aren't any datagrids or repeaters that like magic crank out markup for you. There aren't any disguised . fields to persist state for you. It's just you, the HTML, and a handful of extension procedures.

To Unit Test

This, in my view, is the most compelling factor to use ASP.NET MVC. When it comes to unit testing, ASP.NET MVC basically defeats ASP.NET web forms. It's not even close. Whereas ASP.NET web forms requires you to jump through all sorts of hoops to test around the web page event lifecycle, the ASP.NET MVC framework just about begs to be tested. There are interfaces just about everywhere stating "mock me up!".

There's a good reason why the greatest ASP.NET MVC followers also tend to be TDD advocates; it's due to the fact ASP.NET MVC in fact will allow for TDD. Professionally, I believe this is where all the passion comes from. Basically put: it's truly hard to do TDD with ASP.NET web forms and really very easy to do it in ASP.NET MVC.

To Have a shot at Something New

I should point out that figuring out ASP.NET MVC is an astonishingly engaging process since the ASP.NET MVC framework staff has been so interactive in the process. I think a great part of the attraction of ASP.NET MVC is that the community's input is not only being taken into consideration, it is definitely being wanted after. The framework has started so many talks and conundrums over best practices that simply following along presents you to concepts you might recently have been uninformed of. I would actually advocate understanding the ASP.NET MVC framework for this factor alone.

So there it is. Apart from these three, I can't think of any other reasons why a developer would learn ASP.NET MVC. Perhaps this is why the adoption rate isn't nearly as high as we believe that it should be. The motivation for using the framework fundamentally boils down to unit testing, control/extensibility, and feeling of boredom/curiosity. Fine reasons, but scarcely game breakers for the huge greater part of programmers out there.