Is ASP.NET webforms swept under the rug to make room for mvc?

Question

I've read all the marketing speak about how mvc and webforms are complementary etc...

However it seems that all the blogs talk about is mvc and the only news coming out is about mvc.

Is Microsoft going to continue to IMPROVE webforms as a first class citizen or will it just be a supported technology as they move all their real efforts, developers and resources to mvc over time?

Is there any real evidence of any new exciting improvements coming to webforms in the near future?

Answer 1

You could do worse than take a look at Phil Haak's post from November:

The Future of WebForms and ASP.NET MVC

He points out 5 key things anounced under ASP.NET at PDC last year:

1. Core Infrastructure including scale and performance
2. Web Forms including issues with Client IDs, ViewState, CSS use, etc
3. AJAX
4. Data and Dynamic Data
5. MVC

Coupled with that, there are things that have been built as part of ASP.NET MVC that have already been released for webforms like the Routing module which is going to be great help in some of my projects, even without using MVC.

On top of those, there are also a number of changes coming in VS2010 that should help web developers using either WebForms or MVC, which would be good.

Bloggers tend to talk about what is shiny and "new", that's the way things go - you're bound to see a lot of words written about it because of that, although MVC is hardly a new design pattern - it goes back at least 30 years.

The same could be said of WPF/Silverlight - are they WinForms/WebForms killers? No. They are alternative offerings, with some benefits over the earlier way of doing things, but also with some differences/drawbacks.

Answer 2

I was at a conference (Remix 08) and Scott Gu said they will definatly be continuing to support both methods and that MVC was not appropriate for every application. Scott said there were a number of coming improvements for web forms model (although didnt say what they were).

The web forms model will not disapear because:
Web forms model is better for some types of applications, e.g. small apps, those requiring long processes that make use of view state useful
Many applications are using it
Many third party components developed for it
ASP.net implementation is not mature yet (although does seem pretty good so far)

Microsoft will probably announce a number of new features in PDC in a few weeks time.