I'm sort of new to asp.net. I know both MVC and Web Forms have their advantages and disadvantages, but I'm more familiar with Web Forms so I've only used that.
I was just wondering if there's something MVC can do that Web Forms can't?
From what I've understood, it's basically just different ways to code but you can get the same results from either.
This may have already been answered but I can't seem to find something that's only doable by MVC or only by Web Forms.
Thanks.
Asking "Can MVC do something that Webforms can't" is like asking "can you store papers in a well organized filing cabinet that you couldn't in a pile on your desk?" The answer, really, is no. The difference between MVC and Webforms is not functionality, it's ease of development, ease of maintainance and scalability. There are problems that webforms handles more naturally (very few IMHO, but they exist) and problems that MVC handles more naturally.
As an additional point, your question could actually be applied to any two frameworks or languages (assuming that some component of the framework is Turing Complete). Not only could you do anything in Webforms in MVC and visa versa, but you could implement the entire functionality of either in C, or R, or COBOL, or TSQL. Choosing a programming tool is about what it can do but what it does easily.
Web forms do everything which can MVC. Its just matter of maintainability, testing, separation between layers etc.
See Java can do everything which can C# , but C# have some more features then Java which make programmer's life easy .
Mostly programmer use new Design Patterns due to their advance features like AngularJs now replacing Jquery due to its advance features like Declarative Way, Directive, Routes, Two way binding. Jquery can also do everything which AngularJs can. But AngularJs more robust then jquery in terms of performance, testing, maintainability, separation of concerns.
Related
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?
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.
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.
I am new to the asp.net world (but not new to .net) and I have been playing around with various things to see how I want to architect a web application I am developing. In my playing around I have decided I did not want to use asp.net's controls, as I have done enough php and ruby on rails to be decently familiar with regular HTML, and a decent amount of javascript.
I see a lot of comparisons between asp.net webforms and asp.net MVC, however when ti comes down to it I am not seeing that much of a difference (and I'll admit that it's probably me missing the differences rather than them not being there). I already have coded my asp.net application using a MVC type of architecture (aspx has the view, aspx.cs has the controller code, and models are separate classes in the app_code directory).
If I do not intend to use asp.net controls and just intend to use pure html and javascript, what are the advantages of using the MVC framework? As of right now, the only one that I am seeing is routing, and I'm sure if I look more I can find easy ways to do custom routing without using the whole MVC framework.
Anyways, if anyone could go into details of asp.net webforms minus the asp controls versus mvc framework, I would be greatly appreciated.
You're going to find a number of differences and reasons to use MVC over WebForms but it's going to depend on whether those differences are important to you or your project. Routing is definitely a big advantage for MVC. Although you can implement custom routing configurations in WebForms it's significantly less intuitive.
Another big advantage is unit testing. Along with an IoC container and a mocking framework, MVC makes unit testing a cinch. It's much easier to isolate actions and behaviors with MVC and test those specifically.
A third advantage is that MVC will help reduce the spaghetti code you're going to write. If you're not planning on using any User Controls then it won't be long before you're missing the HTML helpers in MVC. The Html, Url, ViewModel, TempData, etc make working with raw HTML much easier.
The inherent validation in MVC is also impressive. It's getting better in MVC2 and now with the integration with client side validation libraries it will save you a ton of time and add a lot of functionality.
No more VIEWSTATE.
There are many others but again it depends on whether those features are important to you. Good luck with your decision!
ASP.NET MVC is built on interfaces, which makes it extensible, easy to write unit tests for, and encourages clean, loosely-coupled architecture.
If you're using 'classic' ASP.Net without using any of the server-side controls, there's not much of ASP.Net that you're using -- it's basically classic ASP with .Net instead of VBScript behind it at that point.
Giving up webcontrols is the biggest reason not to use ASP.Net MVC. If you're fine giving that up, I'd just use ASP.Net MVC and be done with it. It's got all the parts you'd need to write yourself anyway, and the parts you don't like, you don't have to use.
In my playing around I have decided I
did not want to use asp.net's
controls, as I have done enough php
and ruby on rails to be decently
familiar with regular HTML
Thats not a good reason to decide against ASP.NET controlls. The importand thing about ASP.NET is Viewstate. It allows you to use event driven programming in Webapplications. This makes a lot of things very easy and productive.
Anyway - as you know ruby on rails I guess you will pick up ASP.NET MVC pretty fast.
First up, if you use ASP.NET MVC you'll be using a supported framework that has books, online resources and hundreds of blog posts surrounding it.
Second, I suspect you need to play with ASP.NET MVC to see it's power. There is way more than WebForms in ASP.NET MVC. For many, the fact that WebForms is optional (you can use different view engines) is a major plus.
For me, the extension points, the cleaner code, and the unit-testability of everything I do are major reasons to never go back to ASP.NET "classic".
My recommendation to you is to get a decent tutorial (look for the Nerd Dinner tutorial), play with ASP.NET MVC, and find out for yourself.
Note: ASP.NET MVC is not for everyone, and if you're heavily into the post-back mechanisms in ASP.NET, or have a heavy investment in server and user controls, then you might not want to take ASP.NET MVC right now. But for your next project you should at least know what your options are.
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I'm doing some maintenance on a classic ASP application for my client, and as I'm looking through the ASP, the following question comes to mind - would it be easier to convert a classic ASP app to ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET WebForms?
In many ways, it appears that at least the HTML of ASP might be easier to convert to MVC than it would be to rip out the HTML chunks and turn them into ASP.NET controls, repeaters, datagrids, etc. Plus having to add in handling and logic for ViewState, etc. might be added work.
I don't think my client will be requesting any upgrade like this, so this is just theoretical.
Let's assume that this ASP code is written very well (which isn't always true of course) so really the question is, will a best-case-well-designed ASP site migrate better to MVC than WebForms?
(Note that I'm very new to ASP.NET MVC, so I might be missing something crucial here).
It depends a lot on how the classic asp app is structured.
The server tag mixed in with HTML is similar to asp.net mvc but MVC is not as messy (or not supposed to be). You might be able to move the classic asp presentation code to a MVC view easier than to a web form. Also classic asp apps were usually developed with the statelessness of the web in mind. There probably is not anything in your classic asp that matches postabacks or viewstate. Classic ASP also uses normal html elements as opposed to asp.net webform controls. In these respects it matches MVC a lot closer than webforms.
If you do not know asp.net webforms or asp.net mvc I would say MVC is the way to go.
If you know webforms very well and don't know much about MVC I would say webforms is the way to go.
But, if your client for some reason does want a redevelopment of the site I would say go with MVC. It's always nice to have a client pay for part of your experience development as long as you can deliver.
On another note I'm always taken aback when I come across a client who wants me to do work on their classic asp site. In every single case the site is a mess. The worse part is that they are usually filled with huge security holes.
I think in a lot of cases it could be easier to convert to MVC than Webforms. Most classic ASP apps demonstrate very little separation of concerns so the biggest task is probably exactly that, seperating out the logic into data access, business logic, business entities and UI components. In doing that it could well be easier to convert the inline ASP code to a view, the business logic into controllers and the business entities into the model.
I don't think one would be easier to convert then the other.
You can code ASP.NET almost the same as you code ASP if you wanted putting a few crucial elements in the codebehind that you could access in the aspx. No databinding, no gridview and no repeater. The view state is there to help you can is easy to figure out, it is not necessary to use it if you don't want and can be turned off in the web.config and turned on with a page attribute. Web forms also have an AspCompat mode which allows access to Request and Response objects or asp, which will allow for page by page conversion if desired.
As for MVC.net, the method for displaying the HTML is quite similar. That in my opinion is where the similarities end. You would still need to separate out all you logic into the MVC model.
Coming from ASP and going to Web.Form and now MVC.Net I can tell you that WebForms were a little annoying/frustrating to learn, with 90% of the MS tutorials teaching you the worst possible habits IE (SQL connections on the page, dragging datasets around in designers). However, once you get past that one is able to do a lot of thing much more quickly then in asp(pagination or build a simple datatable with editing for example), I have however STILL never seen a large webforms project with an n-tier design that I thought was easy to follow, implement and use.
MVC.NET is like a godsend. It forces patterns and practices down your throat, it has strict rules that are adhered to by most. It allows for easy code coverage and separation of concerns. After being frustrated with webforms for years it finally feels like I am not hacking things together when attempting to do something that I cant drag off the tool bar.
I personally would try webforms so you will know how much better MVC is when you start using it.
There is more to ASP.NET-MVC than the apparent similarities between view code and ASP inline code. There is all the Model and Controller parts to consider which is very different from the way most ASP is written.
That said I would say that MVC would be the best place to start.
IMO WebForms attempt to hide html too much for my liking and may cause your project to take longer than you would like due to converting a lot of html into the webforms controls.
On the other hand MVC allows you to reuse some of this logic while making your application much more maintainable and with the appropriate Architectural Pattern your application can be developed and refactored much quicker than any WebForms project.
I say MVC all the way!
Either way, it's always best to start from scratch and implemented only the logic.
I started ASP a long time ago (more than 12 years ago) and only in 2006 I moved to ASP.NET 2.0, not even today I know all, but I do know pretty much what I do everyday at work.
In my opinion now, and looking back to my knowledge of ASP I would go to Web Forms instead of MVC, first, it's a language that it's in the "market" some some yeras now and very used across the world, while MVC is still in Beta, so, not suitable for production environment (says Microsoft - even if this site is written in MVC).
I do tend to make confusion with MVC diagram still, and there are more tricks than I want to learn if I need to do a fast change of one ASP project.
It depends. The ASP.NET MVC is no silver bullet and in many ways takes a few steps backwards in terms of developer productivity.
If you have a tight budget and need to get this done fast I believe ASP.Net is the way to go since it has the wealth of controls like grids, paging, validation etc that you can use right out of the box. Using these controls will no doubt save a lot of dev time. All of these controls that most consider pedestrian by now in ASP.NET all have to be created from scratch or taken from the Internet when you use the ASP.NET MVC project.
On the other hand if you have the time and budget now and going forward, and you want to have a solution that is rock solid, and more easily lends itself to test driven development, the ASP.NET MVC is probably the best choice.
Definately ASP.NET MVC is better in terms of style. (That said, you don't have to use Repeaters and other silly controls in a WebForms app, you can simply use inline code just like you would in MVC.)
MVC in general though would be an easier port, give you a better structure and be a more pleasant experience.
Web Forms is more object-oriented, while MVC is like classic ASP on top of .NET code. Model design should be the same using Web Forms or MVC. The only difference is that Web Forms has an object-oriented abstraction to the UI and MVC uses functions and code snippets instead of classes to organize UI code.
ASP.NET MVC is better than Web Forms for automated unit testing of the UI. However, automated unit testing in general is bad practice and even worse for the UI. Manual testing is the best way to build a quality application and to make the best use of development time. Creating automated unit tests is a waste of time and you end up with junk code to maintain with the core code. Lots of developers like automated unit tests because they think they are proof their application works, which is false. They also are trying to avoid designing applications using UML so they are using test driven development to design using code which is responsible for poorly designed applications. With TDD, you are refactoring code you wrote poorly without thinking about the big picture using models in the first place.
So MVC is useless. Web Forms uses a better object oriented model whereas MVC is more like old style classic ASP and other older design patterns. This is 2010 and MVC is dead. Web Forms is like ORM for the UI.
If yes, when? and how much time do you think that the process will take to migrate your current projects (if it's the case)?
ASP.NET MVC is not meant to replace WebForms. They are different technologies and are designed for different purposes.
Making a blanket statement of saying that I'll only use one and not the other is a very narrow minded approach, as you're missing the pros and cons of each technology.
Microsoft is commited to both technologies going forward and there are quite a few sweet new features coming in WebForms 4.0.
I'll be using WebForms and ASP.NET MVC, but looking at the needs of the current project so that I make the right decision for the current implementation
I've been using it for a few months now. I absolutely love MVC. Converting existing projects may not be realistic, depending on available time. As I see it, Web Forms simulates windows forms development for the old VB crowd. While MVC doesn’t pretend it’s something it’s not and follows the Http process more closely.
A few plusses I see in MVC
1) It’s testable with unit tests
2) Direct control over Html. We make websites, how do we accept not being able to control all our html?
3) No viewstate baggage
4) No control tree to waste time rendering
5) Automatic binding of a modal from a form post
6) It can be rather sexy
And a few disadvantages
1) No more web controls (and many rich 3rd party controls are lost)
2) Slower to develop in
3) Large learning curve
4) Still in Beta (CTP soon though)
Yes for my new projects. But not for current production software.
Yes, in as orderly a fashion as possible.
MVC opens .NET up to the world of Best Practices for Agile development. It specifically addresses concerns about Separation of Concerns, and coupling/cohesion. It also lets us write more-portable software without creating a dependency on any vendor-specific references or components.
It unquestionably is a successor to WebForms, along with WPF, regardless of whatever PR you might read.
The Wikipedia entry is pretty clear, even before being updated for Microsoft's MVC.
Assuming you prefer ASP.NET MVC to Web Forms, it's worth it for a system that's in active development/maintenance.
They can coexist side-by-side, so it's possible to migrate parts of the application (new ones, or selected old ones) and see how it works out. If it's a success, keep going.
An "all or nothing" migration could be disastrous, though - investing a lot without quick feedback is a huge risk.
WebForms are for rich UIs
These can be done just the same with MVC or Webforms. A year from now rich MVC based toolkits will arrive (technically they're already here if you like YUI, ExtJS, etc.) and make this argument null and void.
migrate your current projects
Migrating an existing WebForms project to MVC doesn't make a lot of sense. What are you going to gain? Using MVC for a new project however can make a lot of sense depending on your requirements.
I was never really fond of WebForms to begin with so getting to work with MVC was like a breath of fresh air to me. I've always much preferred the separation of concerns as I could work on the chunks that I was really good at developing, the logic and the data access, and leave the presentation work to the members of the team who had that natural ability. I think the MVC library makes it easier for teams to work together on individual pages as one person can work on the controller and the other person can work on the view.
All that being said, when I'm working on projects where I don't need to focus as much on the coding and it is more display oriented, I still go back to the WebForms because they are so much easier to implement and get up and running. Both have their places and I don't think one will ever supersede the other.
I've been using ASP.NET MVC for several months now and I prefer it to Web Forms. However, I don't see myself migrating my existing projects to MVC. For me, it would be rather pointless. However, all of my new ASP.NET projects will (or should be) developed using MVC, as it is a much better (and more flexible) framework.
Personnaly I restricted ASP.NET MVC for lightweight Front Office Web Sites.
But still using ASP.NET WebForms for Righ BackOffice Applications to take advantage of rich custom controls and some of other nice features of Web Forms.
Another plus for mvc is that javascript like jquery is much easier to implement, so if you plan on using a lot of js, mvc might be the way to go.
No, there's no reason to. It's an alternative style, one I am not fond of. But that's just my opinion; a lot of people like it and I hope it works well for them.
As already said, they're not mutually exclusive, and I play to make good use of both.
IMO MVC is better for web sites, while WebForms are better for web applications.
For example, this site is a perfect showcase for where ASP.NET MVC is a good choice because of the nature of the site and what needs to be accomplished; other good examples would be a web store, or a project management site (like Basecamp), or a social network.
If you were developing a corporate CRM/ERP system, however, I'd stick with WebForms to get rich controls and a more "desktop-like" programming model, since a CRM application is traditionally the domain of a desktop application.
ASP.NET MVC fits my desired style of development better, but I'm wary of trusting myself to it whilst it's not been RTM. It also is different enough that our legacy code will not work with it. If we had been practising Domain-Driven Development things might have been easier, but ...
What are some helpful things that ASP.NET MVC developers could suggest that would help us ASP.NET WebForms developers to write better code/web apps?
I'm a WebForms guy but with all the new hype around MVC I'd value some comments on helpful tips, tricks and strategies that might be able to be used in a webforms app.
Something that occurred to me a while ago when learning about the new MVC framework, is that WebForms was, I think, an attempt at MVC in many ways. The markup and code-behind comprise View and Controller, and you're left to write your own Model.
This idea goes hand in hand with the important design considerations I gained from learning about MVC. The most important of which is solidifying the core domain of your system as a whole and making sure all common logic is defined at a level that is reusable within this domain. This is your Model, and I like to call the logic that lives at this level Domain Logic (I mix terms, I know). Your Model should be reusable across different applications (a main web/winforms app, winforms apps for utility and configuration, background processing services, web services, etc.). Your applications should stay very specific to their purpose: they consist of Presentation Logic (their views) and Application Logic (their controllers). Anything that crosses the line of needing to be used in other applications is easily classifiable as Domain Logic, and should not be part of the application code for any given application.
I hope that makes sense.
The gist of it is, even if you're not using a pure MVC framework or object model or whatever, this high level look at design can be applied with great effect. Isolate common logic in a domain layer that is reusable across applications and your applications are much easier to write and extend and maintain.
Forget about page life cycle
There is no ViewState (by default that is)
There are no postbacks
You need to know the HTTP protocol basics (GET/POST). The same goes with HTML (DropDownList is actualy a tag)
I would recommend geting started by watching the screencasts on Microsoft's Learn site:
ASP.NET MVC Videos
There you will learn the differences between the WebForms postback model, and the way that MVC directly routes your URLs to Actions & Methods.
The second major difference is to remember that in ASP.NET MVC you do not use controls that do postbacks. It might feel a bit more like Classic ASP where code is inline on the page within server side blocks, but it is worth it. You will have full control over the HTML that is generated, and this is very good for things like Search Engine Optimization.
Some advices
Don't use standard controls. Instead pay attention jQuery, MooTools.
Use strongly typed Models
It's good practice to use some IoC like Spring.NET
I'm also coming from webforms, but have been learning asp.net MVC since around preview 3.
I'm not exactly sure how to bring anything from MVC into webforms, they are two entirely different frameworks. I'm probably too new with it to understand how any of it could be applied to webforms, but right now it seems they have very little in common.
Some of the strengths of MVC are it's rigid structure on how you need to do things and where you put code. It also does away with the form runat=server and I believe does not promote the usage of any of the asp.net server controls (you need to write all the HTML yourself). That is pretty much the definition of webforms right there. MVC pretty much replaces webforms with it's own framework.
If you ever did Classic ASP or PHP, I would call ASP.net MVC a more structured framework for what people might do with those older scripting languages. It's kind of like the FuseBox framework, but even more structured and evolved.