ASP.NET MVC or WebForms?

Question

I'm very new to web development, have many years background on the desktop, but nothing on web, only html. I want to make a simple dynamic webpage for a product I've been working on by myself, but I don't know which of the two, MVC or WebForms, would be easier for me.

The lessons at asp.net didn't help me much, I took the "first step" tutorials for both MVC and WebForms, but I still don't see any significant difference.

What I ask for is an examplanation for a person, who's not professional at web development, or better yet, for a desktop programmer.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you're used to the desktop, and WinForms or WPF in particular, go with webforms to more easily grok what's going on. The server controls will appear to keep their state, and it'll more a more natural progression. You'll find that the server controls do a lot of work for you, and you should be able to spin up an application using the knowledge from the WinForms world.

Answer 2

If it's a quick application with limited pages, take a look at webmatrix, that might get you up and running quickly. I'd also recommend you going for webforms if you're from a desktop environment as this was developed to mimic the event driven approach and tries to abstract the stateless form of the web.

Answer 3

If you're used with desktop programming paradigms winforms should be a lot easier to learn.

If you want to go more into web-programming "as it should be" I'd personally advice you to learn MVC (anyway this is my personal opinion ;) ).