Lightweight .NET web development?

Question

I'm currently working on a project that has a sizable amount of both client and web code. The client code is written in C# and the web piece is written in PHP. Maintaining consistency between the two worlds is becoming cumbersome, and I want to consolidate the web code to .Net.

The issue is that I hate web development in ASP.Net Web Forms. I want something as raw as PHP, just using C# instead. I've read a little about ASP.Net MVC, but it looks like it abstracts too much of the request logic for my liking.

Does anyone know of a lightweight way to allow C# + .Net to handle web requests? Should I be looking more closely at MVC?

Update: I went with ASP.Net MVC and I've been very pleased so far.

Answer 1

If you're looking to get away from ASP.NET Web Forms, the I recommend ASP.NET MVC with a custom view engine (like Spark, or NHaml). This will give you the consolidation your looking for and allow you to avoid most of the Web Forms that your not happy with.

AFAIK, to do .NET web development, you are going to have to interact with ASP.NET in some form or another, but the custom view engines in MVC could be exactly the abstraction your looking for.

Answer 2

It is now possible to use a software stack completely separate to IIS and ASP.Net using Kyak, Nancy and Gate.

http://bvanderveen.com/a/gate-0.1.0/