ASP.NET MVC ready for business applications (integrating 3rd party controls/components)?

Question

My company has developed (and still continues to develope) a large ASP.NET business application. Our platform is ASP.NET 2.0 using some ASP.NET Ajax. We're extensively using third-party components, like webgrids, comboboxes, treeviews, calendar and scheduling controls etc.

Now, I don't know a lot of ASP.NET MVC and I'd like to know if there is a way to use these third-party-controls in the ASP.NET MVC model. Or do vendors have to rewrite their products in order to make them suitable for ASP.NET MVC?

Answer 1

If they use the ASP.NET Control Model (That will be about 99,9% of controls written by ASP.NET Control vendors), they have to rewrite their controls. How much work there is in that, is very different depending of there arhitecture of their controls - the more ajax they already use, the more posible it is that they easily can change it to MVC.

ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit for exsample can work with MVC. You can see how to do this in a video on WWW.ASP.NET: http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc-videos/video-373.aspx

Answer 2

The ISV market definitely has smoe catching up to do with MVC, but that makes sense - it isn't RTM yet (although the last preview at least had an explicit "go live" licence). Regular Webforms controls will pretty-much need re-writing.

I don't imagine it will take long for the major players to catch up, but if you are using something from a smaller company it could be hard getting it to prioritise MVC. One (really hacky) option might be using an IFRAME or AJAX to treat a portion of the page as a separate aspx page... really, really nasty.

Answer 3

Much of the controls will need rewriting, as most of them need the postback model in class ic webforms. And there is no postback in asp.net mvc.

so: postback required for the component? -> won't work in asp.net mvc

Answer 4

You gotta question how interested the 3rd party market is in creating mvc controls when it has such a low market share. They seem to want to just focus on webforms and silverlight/wpf controls.

Answer 5

For the record. I received the Telerik email newsletter with some interesting news:

"One of our most exciting product novelties is that RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX are able to work in the new Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework." [...]

Link: Telerik RadControls in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC

Answer 6

I am reviewing syncfusion tools for mvc (just downloaded it). It's worth a look-see. Seems to be actually designed to work for MVC.