Should I dive into ASP.NET MVC or start with ASP.NET Webforms?

Question

• I plan to pick up Silverlight in the future.
• Possibility of going into Microsoft WPF.
• Currently learning Objective-C 2.0 w/ Cocoa.

I already know Pros and Cons of ASP.NET MVC vs ASP.NET Webforms. What I want to know is what would be more "efficient" for me to learn given the circumstances above?

By efficient I mean learning one design pattern once and then re-using it. Objective-C I believe uses MVC approach? What about Silverlight? WPF?

I'll be going to B&N tomorrow to pick up an ASP.NET book so I need to decide right now between webforms and mvc.

Also as a side question is it true that ASP.NET Webforms is often used by freelancers/small companies and ASP.NET MVC in large enterprises?

Answer 1

I truly believe that ASP.NET MVC is more aligned to how the web works as winforms, but that doesn't mean anyone should just ditch ASP.NET Webforms and just use ASP.NET MVC. I think you should attempt to look at both, regardless of what your future plans are.

As far as I can tell, the pattern used commonly amongst WPFers is MVVM (Model, View, View-Model).

As for your last question, regarding the use of ASP.NET MVC in large enterprises vs ASP.NET Webforms in small companies. I believe that you should pick the technology (talking specifically about mvc vs webforms) that suites your coding style the best.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Answer 2

I second PieterG's comment and would like to add:

If you are looking to learn a platform on which you want to put different kinds of view layers on top, I would highly recommend MVC over Web forms. Another way to ask the question would be: in your application, does data have first class status?

I build mostly reporting applications, so the answer for me is: yes!

Based on personal experience, its a lot easier for me to build a set of ReSTful controllers which handle business logic. Then when I want to push it to a RIA front-end (I do Flex), all I do is add another ReSTFul method to get me the data in XML so I can work with it in Flex. So, for example if I have Urls like this that return HTML (i.e. aspx) pages:

example.com/stuff/

I can then add a method (or even just a route in the route table) to do this:

example.com/stuff/xml

In other words, I am able to turn my controller into a data service with minimal effort and this has worked very well for me for exporting to XML, Json, even Excel. Doing the same in web forms is very painful.