Alex Rivera | Logout

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

Asked 2008-10-14T07:29:07.170
11

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?

Edit
Report

1 Answer

5

I am going to go out on a limb here and disagree with the general idea that MVC is the "enterprise" framework here or is somehow the better of the two.

MVC is great! But just look at the name. It stands for "Model, View, Controller"... see the "view" in there?

Now look at the competition, "Web Forms"... see the "forms" in that one?

MVC does a great job in "view" type situations. For sites that publish content ("views" of information) MVC probably has an edge, especially for larger systems that need a lot of testing and very a formal design to support intelligent view switching.

For applications that interact heavily with the user via forms (data collection and data entry heavy apps) web forms has an edge due to the inherent use of form posts as a primary mechanism.

While you can do views with web forms and you can do forms with MVC, each has trade-offs. In the current state of MVC, I find that writing heavy data entry "views" is much more difficult and painful than with web forms... and I don't mean a little bit.

In the future I do expect to see MVC get better with dealing with data entry scenarios, but these scenarios will likely come at a pretty high price compared to doing those with web forms.

Neither is more "enterprise" level than the other as far as I can tell... what I'm most interested in going forward are hybrid applications that use MVC for the display and publishing end of the business while web forms are used more naturally for heavy data entry end... all in the same web project... I sure hope we see something like that.

answered 2008-10-14T12:49:12.593

Your Answer