Is ASP.NET MVC a bad choice for a large enterprise project?

Question

We are about to embark on a large enterprise application. I am seriously considering using ASP.NET MVC because:

1. We need to use Microsoft technology (biz logic is all C#)
2. Performance is critical
3. I'd like to test as much as possible

My team has only used PHP for web development, but are very experienced with .NET winforms (so either way we have a learning curve). My concern is that some people have expressed concerns about ASP.NET MVC's scalability to large apps. But from what I read webforms have their own problems as well.

Should I be reconsidering webforms, or stick with my gut and use ASP.NET MVC?

Related:

Should I build my next web app in ASP.NET MVC? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/521388/from-webforms-to-asp-net-mvc

Answer 1

ASP.NET webforms are heavyweight and drop a crapton of stuff on your webpages, both in html/javascript and serialized viewstate. I remember my first ASP.NET website causing the GC to blowed up because of all the short-lived objects being rehydrated from that godawful viewstate. Oh, when I was young and naive (i.e., 2 years ago)... You have to have a very good understanding of webforms to build scalable websites from them. Possible? Definitely. Easy? Not.

ASP.NET MVC is harder to code initially, but is SO much easier to develop than webforms. The hardest things to learn are 1) the conventions aka "magic strings", 2) Html + inline code aka ASP and 3) html forms.

With MVC, you can't get away with the state nightmare that is so common to webforms development, which means that means your webpages are meth-addict slim. It also means you have to code your state a little smarter. The code is also MUCH simpler and scales MUCH better than traditional webforms, imho.

Also, testing with ASP.NET is near impossible, due to the hard-coded and unmockable dependencies baked into the framework. ASP.NET MVC replaced all of these with System.Web.Abstractions members that are mockable wrappers around these badly-designed and untestable objects.

Run, don't walk, to MVC.

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For the obvious-impared, if you use a framework that sits ontop of the ASP.NET framework, such as MVC or any other that you wrote or that somebody else wrote, OBVIOUSLY some of these remarks don't apply.

If, on the other hand, you code as early man did against the ASP.NET webforms model (e.g., Response.Write() in Page_Load), my comments apply.

Can you write code that's testable against ASP.NET? Sure. Can you do it without including special testing code you or somebody else wrote? Sure. If you have TypeMock.