How to choose between ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms

Posted: April 13th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Book Review | 34 Comments »

A few days ago I had a chance to see a tweet from Wrox inviting users to participate in a private review access to ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution and fortunately I was among those 10 lucky guys who  gained access to the first eight chapters of the book (it sounds good that authors are starting to offer sample chapters in private or public preview forms like what ScottGu has done by publishing the first chapter of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0). Meanwhile I don’t want to write a classic review post about this book because the book is not yet officially published and also I don’t have access to other chapters. I just want to thank Wrox guys and book authors to do this and I’m sure such movements will increase Wrox books quality.

What I want to talk about in this blog post is a very good ‘How to’ section in chapter 2 of this book: ‘How do I choose between MVC and Web Forms’. It has been a common question among all ASP.NET developers since the first preview releases of ASP.NET MVC and many guys in the community have wrote posts and articles about it. The last discussion I remember on this topic was Rachel Appel’s session at MIX ‘09 titled ‘Choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC’ (you can also download a high-res video here) that was very useful. After reading the book preview chapters I found a very good and practical way to rank your real need in the book and it was a worksheet to help you make the right decision for a project; as we read in the book:
After publishing this post I found out that author has already posted about this on his own website. So to respect his and Wrox Press rights I removed the mentioned section from chapter 2 of the book and you can read about it at http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/12/introducing-aspnet-mvc-part-2-aspnet-mvc-vs-webforms/ 
P.S.: I want to thank Nick Berardi, Al Katawazi and Marco Bellinaso, that are the book authors, for their cool book :-)

P.S. (2): As I found out (after publishing this post, and I swear I haven’t ever seen that) there is an original post about this by Nick Berardi and so I reference it here and I may remove the whole post content except this link if Nick or Wrox request (I did it) that but it seems that someone likes to argue about this more than what the owners of the book should do. Dear Lee! I don’t need to get impression as you said; I just wanted to spread a good word and thank them but you introduced me as a community killer and I’m so sorry for you!

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

34 Comments on “How to choose between ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms”

  1. 1 Ted Darling said at 8:48 pm on April 13th, 2009:

    Mahdi,

    I just wanted to thank you for sharing this. I have an app that I started with Web Forms and about a day into thought that since ASP.NET MVC 1.0 just launched that I would try it.

    Here’s something that I found that seems easier to do with MVC and that is using LINQ to display data on a page. It just seems so much easier to grab sub objects with no need for extra bindings or code that would be needed when using web forms.

    Ted

  2. 2 Rob Conery said at 2:31 am on April 14th, 2009:

    So here’s the problem with a chart like this: the assumption is that you can score things as a "need/don’t need". For instance:

    >>>Need to use existing third party controls for ASP.NET Web Forms

    Many people would say "well, yah, we really need our Tree Control that we’ve been using for years. Oh well, looks like WebForms it is". The problem here is that you’re pitting a need for a Tree Control against something like testability and better markup (10 versus 12). It’s actually not a comparison at all – you can replace a Tree View control with jQuery in about 10 minutes and have both.

    I appreciate their attempt at this chart – but it really shouldn’t be used.

  3. 3 Mahdi Taghizadeh said at 5:09 am on April 14th, 2009:

    @Ted
    Glad to see it was useful to you but you should thank the book authors for their original work. I just re-published it here and everything belongs to them.

  4. 4 Mahdi Taghizadeh said at 5:31 am on April 14th, 2009:

    @Rob
    I do emphasize that it’s not a work by me! I just quoted it here.

  5. 5 Sean said at 1:50 pm on April 14th, 2009:

    The lady from that video talks entirely too much.

  6. 6 Marti Kaljuve said at 8:56 pm on April 14th, 2009:

    Thanks for sharing this, hadn’t noticed it earlier. I created a simple form with Nick’s worksheet to share this with colleagues: http://marti.labidas.com/static/mvc-vs-webforms/
    Though I agree with Rob in that it isn’t always as simple as "need/don’t need", I still believe I can use this to further convince my workplace to adopt MVC in future projects.

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    [...] How to choose between ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms (Apr 13, 2009) [...]

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