ASP.Net MVC vs ASP.Net Forms

Question

Why would you consider using ASP.Net MVC or standard ASP.Net with forms and controls for a web project? Apart from personal preference what would be the reasons? What sort of projects do you find more suitable for MVC and what projects for normal ASP.Net?

Would you consider transferring your current projects to one or another?

Answer 1

ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC are two web frameworks developed by Microsoft - they are both good choices. Neither of the web frameworks are to be replaced by the other nor are there plans to have them 'merged' into a single framework. Continued support and development are done in parallel by Microsoft and neither will be 'going away'.

Each of these web frameworks offers advantages/disadvantages - some of which need to be considered when developing a web application. A web application can be developed using either technology - it might make development for a particular application easier selecting one technology versus the other and vice versa.

ASP.NET Web Forms:

• Development supports state • Gives the illusion that a web application is aware of what the user has been doing, similar to Windows applications. I.e. Makes 'wizard' functionality a little bit easier to implement. Web forms does a great job at hiding a lot of that complexity from the developer.
• Rapid Application Development (RAD) • The ability to just 'jump in' and start delivering web forms. This is disputed by some of the MVC community, but pushed by Microsoft. In the end, it comes down to the level of expertise of the developer and what they are comfortable with. The web forms model probably has less of a learning curve to less experienced developers.
• Larger control toolbox • ASP.NET Web Forms offers a much greater and more robust toolbox (web controls) whereas MVC offers a more primitive control set relying more on rich client-side controls via jQuery (Javascript).
• Mature • It's been around since 2002 and there is an abundance of information with regards to questions, problems, etc. Offers more third-party control - need to consider your existing toolkits.

ASP.NET MVC:

• Separation of concerns (SoC) • From a technical standpoint, the organization of code within MVC is very clean, organized and granular, making it easier (hopefully) for a web application to scale in terms of functionality. Promotes great design from a development standpoint.
• Easier integration with client side tools (rich user interface tools) • More than ever, web applications are increasingly becoming as rich as the applications you see on your desktops. With MVC, it gives you the ability to integrate with such toolkits (such as jQuery) with greater ease and more seamless than in Web Forms.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friendly / Stateless • URL's are more friendly to search engines (i.e. mywebapplication.com/users/ 1 - retrieve user with an ID of 1 vs mywebapplication/users/getuser.aspx (id passed in session)). Similarly, since MVC is stateless, this removes the headache of users who spawn multiple web browsers from the same window (session collisions). Along those same lines, MVC adheres to the stateless web protocol rather than 'battling' against it.
• Works well with developers who need high degree of control • ASP.NET web forms automatically generates much of the raw HTML you see when an page is rendered. This can cause headaches for developers. With MVC, you have complete control over what is rendered and there are no surprises. Even more important, is that the HTML forms typically are much smaller than the Web forms which can equate to a performance boost - something to seriously consider.
• Test Driven Development (TDD) • With MVC, you can more easily create tests for the web side of things. An additional layer of testing will provide yet another layer of defense against unexpected behavior.

Authentication, authorization, configuration, compilation and deployment are all features that are shared between the two web frameworks.

Answer 2

You can find many differences, advantages about the ASP.Net MVC over the normal ASP.Net

Applications. if not kindly visit stack overlow page.

Biggest advantage to using ASP.Net MVC vs web forms

the reason for choosing the MVC concept for your application vary on many things

1. What for your application for ? either kind of forum, reporting tool or intranet website

2. Whether you want to follow desing pattern or not?

   if yes, then whether is that going to be MVC or any other ??

3. Whether you need modularity for future enhancements?

4. Whether you need full control on your code?

5. Better support on the testing part from the developer perspective should be there or not?

If are sure about those things, then you can move ur appln to MVC framework model.

Other wise its better to continue with ASP.Net Web.apps, because it includes all the latest

features what the current industry needs.

Answer 3

WebForms is an abstraction which hides the mechanics of the web from the developer. It allows desktop developers to relatively easily transfer their skills to the web. Whilst it does achieve this in part, in practical scenarios it is usually not long before the abstraction breaks and one has to put in messy workarounds. Unit testing is difficult, because the logic for handling user interactions is tightly coupled with the UI. The HTML produced by a typical WebForms app is far from optimal. It is typically bloated, difficult to read and contains a lot of content which is present only to allow the abstraction to work, e.g. viewstate, which is a huge blob of information to help the abstraction give the illusion of state to the developer, even though the web is a stateless medium.

MVC, however, embraces the mechanics of the web. The fundamental operations which take place in a web request and response are presented to the developer as simple abstractions. MVC has a clear separation of concerns. The model simply represents the business objects or entities with which the system is concerned, with methods for retrieving and storing instances of these objects. The controller take a web request, performs operations against the model, and then hands the model to the view. The view is purely a renderer, for presenting the model to the user and exposing interface items which allow the user to formulate the next request to pass to a controller. This separation of concerns allows for relatively easy unit testing. The developer has complete control over the HTML produced and there is no need for other artifacts to be present (e.g. viewstate).

I prefer MVC. For rare occasions it may be useful to use Webforms, e.g. a quick prototype or demo, but otherwise I would always recommend the use of MVC.

As for transferring a project from Webforms to MVC, this is obviously very subjective and dependent on the application itself, and budgetary constraints, but in general I believe this is a step in the right direction.