Learn Asp.Net WebForms or Asp.Net MVC

Question

It might be a dupe but I cannot find a straight answer. If a person is about to start learning web development over .Net framework, which technology should he go for ?

• Asp.Net WebForms
• Asp.Net MVC

keeping in view these three aspects

• future scope
• complexity
• features

Note: has done some WinForms programming using C#

Thanks

Answer 1

Important Update (2019): If you are still wondering whether to use webforms or not; the answer is a categorical no. Have a look at new ASP.NET technologies and stick to .NET Core. Any new project should use .NET Core and C#.

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This can be fairly controversial :)

My personal opinion is; stop investing in webforms (it is a broken model for the web) and learn Asp.Net MVC so not only you can produce well design web applications but you can use your knowledge elsewhere on the web. MVC makes you aware of HTTP, HTML and other underlying 'web infrastructure' giving you a better chance for successful results.

So unless you want to make money (again totally personal opinion, take it with a pinch of salt) supporting old installations of webforms (a bit like COBOL - hold you horses webforms fans :) ) I would definitely, strongly suggest Asp.Net MVC ;). Granted I don't know the recent developments on webforms (especially 4.0 ones), so you might want to wait for those as well..

Edit: If you think past winforms experience is going to be an advantage or an argument for using webforms (which is the main selling point for Microsoft developers, I think), you'd be right for about a week and wrong for the rest of the time. In both webforms and winforms you have controls. Similarity ends there. Event model is totally different, threading is completely different, you cant even start comparing rendering and so on. This is actually the main issue with webforms; trying to look like winforms on a totally different architecture.