Web Form or MVC

Question

I am about to create a new web site and i do not know what is the best approach to do it use web form or MVC any hint?

Answer 1

Hint:

• Determine your needs
• Determine what your servers support and what it would cost to get them to support the technologies you are looking at
• Determine what skills your team has already and the cost of learning the technologies would be

Answer 2

There isn't a definitive answer for this question. Before continuing, please read the article About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular) by Scott Guthrie.

Without any aditional information, I'd prefer ASP.NET MVC, for what it means.

Answer 3

I'm still learning about .NET and I'm struggling as well with its structure and options. It's not just between MVC and Web Forms (this may be the best reading among all links in this answer), there's also difference between "Web Site" and "Web Application".

So far I believe the main difference between MVC and Web Forms is how they manage the state, MVC being stateless like any regular web page. With that independence comes the other points, MVC being harder to develop, not so easily integrated, and Web Forms harder to test and deploy, as it will mostly work as one big package only. That statefull property of Web Forms also generates lots of anger among experts who don't even realize that you can apply MVC (in its original meaning - thanks eKeK0 for the link) to Web Forms.

Those inherited diverging points seem to me like the same basic differences between Web Site and Web Application, but for another reason - the Web Site approach compiles separate DLLs for each aspx component, while the web application makes all in one DLL.

All that being said, in which we can conclude there's evidently no best choice, I am leaning towards starting with MVC rather than Web Forms (which is more intuitively a newbie's choice since it should be easier to ride), in which I'll just try to learn about and follow some best practices. That should be the main concern.