hello
we are planning to start new asp.net web based application in few weeks.
we have three members in our team all with experinced in asp.net 2.0
we are jumping direct from asp.net 2.0 to 4.0 (skiping 3.5)
we were discussing should we go for asp.net 4.0 webforms or should we learn/develop in asp.net MVC.
we dont have any MVC experience before.
if you guys think MVC is the way to go then please recommend good books using c#.
As with all engineering decisions, it depends.
Is your timeline long enough that you can ride the learning curve? Is everyone OK with learning MVC, or are you going to get blowback? Does your team know and understand HTML and CSS? I know this seems like a silly question, but a lot of ASP.NET WebForms programmers get by without really understanding the concepts for quite some time.
Do you want to make pervasive use of Ajax and CSS? Does anyone know JQuery or one of the other JS frameworks and want to make the best of them? Is unit testing important to you?
If the answers to these questions are, in general, "yes", then I would recommend taking the plunge and going for ASP.NET MVC over WebForms. As far as a book goes, I'll leave that to others. I still have not found a book that I really like yet.
I know that I'm pretty much an exclusive ASP.NET MVC programmer for new projects going forward. IMO WebForms is a broken and outdated model. Viewstate is painful for developers and web services, and postbacks are painful for users.
If you are comfortable with and know Web Forms well, use those.
Generally, use the tool you are most comfortable with.
My suggestion is: if you are tight scheduled and development team is experienced with web forms 2.0, your choose should be web form. It is nothing so serious happend between 2.0 and 4.0 that you might loose competence. Web forms still web forms.
If you have month or so as buffer to get in into MVC, you should do that. It is more natural for web development, and what I like - more testable.
I'm personally not to quick to rewrite my applications on MVC 2.0, and even start new project with MVC.. Maybe I wait for 3.0 version :)
A lot of information is here: http://www.asp.net/mvc
A also got sources of Mvs2inaction (please google for Mvc2inaction and be pointed to github site)
And sure you have to check Phil Haack blog.
(sorry could not post a lot of links yet))
As others have answered already about what to choose between Web Forms and MVC, if you have decided to go for MVC you can find book recommendation in following links -
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1281726/good-asp-net-mvc-vb-books (Although the questions is about VB books but answers are for both)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942068/best-resources-books-for-asp-net-mvc-framework-closed
Also I would like to recommend one new book which I have just started to read. This is good for understanding the concepts and compares Web Forms and MVC.