Usefulness of asp.net MVC framework as opposed to coding MVC style with regular asp.net?

Question

I am new to the asp.net world (but not new to .net) and I have been playing around with various things to see how I want to architect a web application I am developing. In my playing around I have decided I did not want to use asp.net's controls, as I have done enough php and ruby on rails to be decently familiar with regular HTML, and a decent amount of javascript.

I see a lot of comparisons between asp.net webforms and asp.net MVC, however when ti comes down to it I am not seeing that much of a difference (and I'll admit that it's probably me missing the differences rather than them not being there). I already have coded my asp.net application using a MVC type of architecture (aspx has the view, aspx.cs has the controller code, and models are separate classes in the app_code directory).

If I do not intend to use asp.net controls and just intend to use pure html and javascript, what are the advantages of using the MVC framework? As of right now, the only one that I am seeing is routing, and I'm sure if I look more I can find easy ways to do custom routing without using the whole MVC framework.

Anyways, if anyone could go into details of asp.net webforms minus the asp controls versus mvc framework, I would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

ASP.NET MVC is built on interfaces, which makes it extensible, easy to write unit tests for, and encourages clean, loosely-coupled architecture.

Answer 2

You're going to find a number of differences and reasons to use MVC over WebForms but it's going to depend on whether those differences are important to you or your project. Routing is definitely a big advantage for MVC. Although you can implement custom routing configurations in WebForms it's significantly less intuitive.

Another big advantage is unit testing. Along with an IoC container and a mocking framework, MVC makes unit testing a cinch. It's much easier to isolate actions and behaviors with MVC and test those specifically.

A third advantage is that MVC will help reduce the spaghetti code you're going to write. If you're not planning on using any User Controls then it won't be long before you're missing the HTML helpers in MVC. The Html, Url, ViewModel, TempData, etc make working with raw HTML much easier.

The inherent validation in MVC is also impressive. It's getting better in MVC2 and now with the integration with client side validation libraries it will save you a ton of time and add a lot of functionality.

No more VIEWSTATE.

There are many others but again it depends on whether those features are important to you. Good luck with your decision!

Answer 3

If you're using 'classic' ASP.Net without using any of the server-side controls, there's not much of ASP.Net that you're using -- it's basically classic ASP with .Net instead of VBScript behind it at that point.

Giving up webcontrols is the biggest reason not to use ASP.Net MVC. If you're fine giving that up, I'd just use ASP.Net MVC and be done with it. It's got all the parts you'd need to write yourself anyway, and the parts you don't like, you don't have to use.

Answer 4

In my playing around I have decided I did not want to use asp.net's controls, as I have done enough php and ruby on rails to be decently familiar with regular HTML

Thats not a good reason to decide against ASP.NET controlls. The importand thing about ASP.NET is Viewstate. It allows you to use event driven programming in Webapplications. This makes a lot of things very easy and productive.

Anyway - as you know ruby on rails I guess you will pick up ASP.NET MVC pretty fast.

Answer 5

First up, if you use ASP.NET MVC you'll be using a supported framework that has books, online resources and hundreds of blog posts surrounding it.

Second, I suspect you need to play with ASP.NET MVC to see it's power. There is way more than WebForms in ASP.NET MVC. For many, the fact that WebForms is optional (you can use different view engines) is a major plus.

For me, the extension points, the cleaner code, and the unit-testability of everything I do are major reasons to never go back to ASP.NET "classic".

My recommendation to you is to get a decent tutorial (look for the Nerd Dinner tutorial), play with ASP.NET MVC, and find out for yourself.

Note: ASP.NET MVC is not for everyone, and if you're heavily into the post-back mechanisms in ASP.NET, or have a heavy investment in server and user controls, then you might not want to take ASP.NET MVC right now. But for your next project you should at least know what your options are.