Safe to jump on ASP.NET MVC bandwagon when building enterprise solutions?

Answer 1

As you know its all about the people first, technology 2nd. You can simply build out a new functionality of your company app because they can co-exist, then you can answer all those questions yourself. It's new stuff so it will of course take more time than what you're used to but heck its all fun so jump right in and start answering these questions for your own people and app.

Answer 2

I can answer half of your question. I've just dove into MVC from a WebForms background. There is (obviously) a learning curve, but it's really not very steep. I've been able to make the transition with little effort, and I find the whole thing to be a breath of fresh air.

However, I am quite capable with front-end technologies (HTML & Javascript), and I don't like the HTML the WebForms and Microsoft ajax framework generates. If you and/or your team are like this, you will love it. However, if you are proud of the in-depth knowledge you have of the event hierarchy, or if you love the simplicity of UpdatePanels, then you'll probably bridle against the changes.

The documentation is OK, enough to get going happily, anyway. Here's a few videos to whet your appetite: http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T49F http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T50F http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T44F

Here's your documentation home: http://www.asp.net/mvc/

For a bit more info, the first chapter of the asp.net mvc 1.0 book is online and can be downloaded for free. See ScottGu's blog here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx

And, the full code for the chapter can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/nerddinner

Finally, in terms of development time, I think it might take a bit longer to develop apps using MVC (although I have no evidence of this), but I think supporting, maintaining, bugfixing and enhancing will take a lot less time. So, with a small up-front investment, I think you'll more than recoup that effort.

Anyway, like I said, these are my preliminary findings. I still have yet to hit a really hairy problem.

Answer 3

Interesting that your question focused all on your concerns and not on any benefits. Have you asked yourself the "why" question? If you feel you can be successful with WebForms, why change to MVC? What is there in MVC that justifies the risks? If you were paying for the project, what would you do?

I'm not pitching WebForms over MVC by any means, but as an architect, you need to be able to come back very strong to the question of why you decided to go away from a very well-known quantity to a relatively new one. I think that there are many good reasons to do so, but it not my job on the line. :)

Answer 4

I'm sorry. this post is not an answer to what fung have asked. I just loved the way he had asked. same case here. as a beginner, i wanna know will ASP.NET MVC work for complex apps ?? I;m not sure.

Answer 5

About 3 months ago, I was told that I needed to develop an enterprise web-app (well, a series of small web-apps actually), but that I could choose whatever technology I wanted.

Since I'm most comfortable with VS/C#/.Net, the dilemma was whether to choose ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC2 -- Unlike you, my only background was with Windows Forms (WinForms) and a little WPF. So I had to research (and try-out) both WebForms and MVC.

Just like you, I realized that my app would be neither Google nor Apple like, but your bog standard company app with thousands of buttons and boxes, etc. WebForms seemed like it would be the fastest to deploy, but hard to test and hard to maintain on a long-term basis. MVC seemed to have a much steeper learning curve, but once established, testing and maintenance would be a breeze.

I only fiddled with WebForms for a week, so I can't really comment on it. But MVC is definitely everything I was expecting it to be.

Yes, it's a steep learning curve. Concepts that were new to me:

• Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Separation of Concerns (SoC)
• Model Binding
• Unit Testing and Test Driven Design (TDD)
• Mocking and Stubbing
• Dependency Injection (DI)

The books that helped me the most were:

• Pro ASP.NET MVC2 by Sanderson (MVC, Model Binding, DI, TDD)
• The Art of Unit Testing by Osherove (TDD, Mocking, Stubbing, DI)

I also had to brush up on my HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Overall, there seems to be a fair amount of ramp-up work in the beginning, but maintaining and extending the existing application has been pretty painless. Whenever I've been asked to make changes, it's been fairly easy and I've typically been able to deliver on-time or even sometimes ahead of schedule.

In an ideal world, writing an MVC app would happen with 2 people. One person writing the core code and a second person writing the UI and the Views (HTML, CSS, Javascript.) Although it's entirely possible to do it all by yourself. (which is what I'm doing right now...)

I have run into some hitches deploying in the Enterprise, though. Internally, my company is running Windows Server 2003 and IIS6. Unfortunately, we have been unable to get the app to deploy properly on IIS6 when using Virtual Pathing. (All the references to and in the CSS files are broken.) If you plan on deploying MVC, I would recommend using IIS7 or higher. MVC supposedly works on IIS6, but requires that your IT department be willing to figure out how to get it to work.

Edit: I just realized I never directly answered your questions. Here goes:

1. My personal experience has said, that, yes, the learning curve is steep for building good Models and UIs, but I'm not really a web-developer so I've been working with that handicap. The good news is that the MVC technology is pretty mature.

2. Yes, the community is pretty well developed and growing. You'll get a lot of good answers from StackOverflow as well as MS's ASP.NET MVC sub-forum.

3. I have no personal experience coding WebForms, but I have coded plenty of WinForms apps and I feel like it's taken me approx. 3 times longer to build this MVC app. The initial investment is a bear, but regular maintenance and improvements seem to come WAY faster, especially as the app has grown... Since you seem to have a team of programmers, it may come faster for you guys as you can probably split up the learning/workload.

4. Again, no prior experience with WebForms, but what I can tell you is that as I was learning ASP.NET MVC, there were times when I was struggling to understand what was going on because I had no prior ASP.NET background. (Example: Membership and Role Providers -- I had to code my own recently. Boy was that fun...) On the plus side, I didn't have any "old ways of doing things" (aka. WebForms) to unlearn either. If you have a team of folks enamored with PostBack / CodeBehind, you can bet that MVC is gonna seem awfully strange at first. But hopefully your team will see the advantages that MVC brings and embraces it fully.

Oh, and it should be noted that you can blend MVC and WebForms. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Although, if I were in your shoes, I'd try to embrace MVC as much as possible and only use WebForms where it clearly makes more sense.

Ok, I hope this helps... :-)