MVC versus WebForms [closed]

Question

It seems to me like there's a lot of sheeping going on, with everyone jumping on the MVC bandwagon. Almost everyone is declaring WebForms as evil and satan without much persuasion. Then they go on to say that Controls are evil and they shouldn't be in a Web app. How are you going to show anything without any controls?

I remember when WebForms first came out and everybody loved them. I guess in a few years, people will sheep on to the next thing and declare MVC evil because you had to actually create controls to use MVC and they'll say you have to develop an application and not worry about the controls.

The way I see it MVC can be achieved in WebForms by not including the RunAt in the Form tag. Then if you want to retrieve data, just use Ajax.

Can someone persuade me on why I should use MVC and not WebForms?

Answer 1

You shouldn't arbitrarily decide between one or the other; don't plump for the MVC framework just because it's the new kid on the block and everyone's singing its praises, especially not if you're comfortable with doing things using Web Forms. Practically every existing system is going to be using the older, more established technology, and there's nothing wrong with that.

While it's true that the MVC framework does allow for even easier separation of concerns (after all, that's what the MVC pattern is for), it also brings with it the responsibility of writing more HTML, and I think a slightly greater understanding of how the web works; not necessarily an unreasonable requirement, but you could argue it'll slightly slow you down the first few times you set about using it.

To be honest, I agree that Web Forms takes a lot of undeserved flack. Granted, there's a lot of magic going on in the background, and you get less control over some of the HTML output, but it's not exactly impossible to style with CSS (you end up using !important a lot, perhaps), and it's also not impossible to get some separation of concerns, even if it doesn't meet the purist's view of what that might be. You can still write pretty horrible code using the MVC framework. If you're looking to throw together something quickly, and you're good with Web Forms, then you're going to be able to achieve that very quickly, and it's nothing to be ashamed of, is it?

That's not to say, of course, that you should stick to your guns and ignore MVC either; it's a good framework (in fact, it's a very good framework) and it does confer several benefits which you might want to take advantage of in the long run. You also have to remember that it doesn't automatically nullify everything you learned about ASP.NET 2.0, either; a lot of the supporting architecture is embraced in the MVC framework, including things like the membership providers.

Answer 2

In Webforms:

Both Viewstate and Postbacks have been made lot of problems and increased complexity of the web application development. Many web pages having hundreds of KB size of Viewstate that affected the performance of the applications sometime.

Developers do not have the control of the rendering HTML of web forms and Server controls that render html with mixed inline style and deprecated tags that does not follows standards.

The page life cycle of the Web Form is too complex and has the tightly coupling between all things in the ASP.net framework and a single class is used both to display output and handles user input.

Unit testing is almost an impossible task. Today unit testing is very important in modern software development especially when we following agile methodologies and practices. Since web is a stateless thing, Events, Postbacks and Viewstate are not a good way.

With asp.net MVC all these things are simplified

If these things don't apply to you and you enjoy using Webforms then stick with what you do best. Don't try to fix something thats not broken.

For more detail refer to : Shiju's blog of ASP.net MVC Vs ASP.net Web Form