Has anybody gone through the process of converting a real-world business application from ASP.NET web forms to MVC? How painful was the transition? Would you say that it was worth it, overall?
I am trying to figure out if it is worthwhile to take the time to convert an application over to MVC for increased performance.
This is just an opinion but I would say don't do it. I've looked into this and have decided that we will use MVC for new apps and total rewrites because of the huge differences involved.
However I guess this really depends on what your asp.net pages looked like in the first place.
I am currently in the process of converting a couple of web form projects over to MVC. At first it was more to get familiar with the MVC, but now I actually really like how the model and the separation it provides.
The transition over has been a little hard in some area's in that there really isn't a lot of material other than some blogs, stackoverflow, and a couple of video casts. There are two books that are semi-available but, one is already kind of useless in that there have already been a number of changes to the framework that there are better ways in handling some things.
I also think you will have to really start to learn jQuery if you are already not familiar with it too. So for me - I feel like I am really learning two things as I've been doing this.
But worth it over all, I would say yes. And I think that converting a small project over is also really a great way to start.