What is the most usual way to develop views in asp.net mvc?

Question

What is the most usual way to develop views in asp.net mvc? Should I be using a view engine other than the default? As far as I know, StackOverflow is the bigger site using ASP.NET MVC, so, what they use?

In the pros of using view engines, it seems like they are easier than the default. In the cons, it seems that they break the original concept of views in ASP.NET MVC (using helpers), they are not very extendable and there aren't intellisense or sintax highlight on Visual Studio IDE for them.

What would you recommend me to do?

Answer 1

Use the default WebFormsViewEngine until you come across a compelling reason not to. I wouldn't write your own. If you don't like WebForms, try Spark.

Answer 2

Use the default for now, with some experience with the default you may find that it suits you just fine for what you are doing, but with this experience you can better weigh the pros and cons later on for yourself against other engines.

Plus if you are learning MVC right now (as I believe most of us are), most of the online tutorials are shown with the default engine, so you would not have to waste the time converting tutorial material into any other view engine.