I have a very large ASP.NET project that i need to make good with web standards -- the application has two parts:
1.) An administrative piece that allows users to 'build' sites
2.) Front end that makes up the users sites (many web controls, master pages, usercontrols, etc... much of it is just code)
I was wondering what poeples recomendations are for making this project utilize web standards? Should i look more into MVC? I havent done anything with MVC but it seems to support friendly URL's by default.
Has anyone done this with an existing large ASP.NET application/site?
thanks in advance :-)
What do you mean by web standards? Valid html/css? no-tale layout? valid javascript?
I suggest you just test it in different browsers and fix the problems you find.
There are two routes you can take.
1) Rip it up and start again
2) Modify what you have and incrementally change it 'one page at a time'
I know that's a simple and obvious answer but truthfully, having done both, they are both viable.
A modern ASP.NET web applciation CAN be standards compliant, can have nice urls with some url re-writing and can seperate content from design. You just need to think before you act, make sure you use .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.5 controls and inspect the output to ensure you're getting good markup.
Converting an old web app to MVC can;'t really be answered without knowing the app itself. It might be perfectly suited to it and be easy, it might be a world of pain.
As always use the best tool for the job.
Related
Firstly, I have only recently tried my hand at building with razor in cshtml using Webmatrix and I found it much less time consuming than building aspx web forms. Having gotten used to it, I can now do all the things I used to do inside my aspx projects much quicker and with much less code...
Now, I've spent today looking around google etc at companies using cshtml, what they're using it for etc, but I can't find a large range of examples out there. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place, rendering this question title incorrect, but I just had a feeling that there is a reason why companies are still using aspx over cshtml.
I'm about to start a project next month for a big client and I can't decide whether to take the step of building it this way (they need a custom blog, login area etc). Any thoughts? The only other stack thread I found of any use with regards to a debate was: Razor/CSHTML - Any Benefit over what we have?
Thanks,
Adam
A lot of it has to do with ASP (classic) has been around a lot longer and (depending the project size) a migration can incur too much cost.
There's also considerations like:
What does the current web staff know (what are they fluent in?)
What libraries (proprietary or otherwise) are already dependent on ASP (including custom controls).
How much of an SEO hit are you going to take converting (some sites can mimic classic aspx page suffixes by just changing the way the routes behaving but are in-fact using cshtml).
There isn't a compelling reason for experienced ASP.NET developers to move from Web Forms or MVC to Web Pages (Razor). As a framework, it is designed to attract those who might find Web Forms or MVC too much of a learning curve. Those coming from Classic ASP or PHP, for example.
I answer a lot of questions on the Web Pages framework over at the ASP.NET forums, and I have definitely seen an increase in the number of people trying the framework out. In terms of functionality and security, you have the whole ASP.NET framework behind you so you can do anything with Web Pages that you can do with MVC or Web Forms - a lot of it more easily.
The Web Pages framework is not designed with testability in mind, and it may be more difficult for teams to organise since a certain amount of server-logic is embedded in the same file as HTML.
If you are a lone developer and happy using Web Pages, go for it.
There been a lot of discussion about the topic. Its just opinions, right tool for the right job. Please look into the following for opinions & answers:
MVC 3 ASPX VS RAZOR View Engine
Razor vs Webforms view engine for new ASP.NET MVC 3 site
What is the difference between Razor and ASPX?
Hope this helps
I have been looking at ASP.Net Web Pages and I think it would be a good replacement for some classic asp sites I am working on. There is a lot about them that is similar to how classic asp did things, so I believe there is a chance I can drag the other programmers into the present. My problem is that I have yet been able to find any indepth documentation to see if there is any "gotchas" I need to be aware of if I choose to go down this path. So if anyone knows of any, I could really use that information. I think going straight to MVC and Web Forms would be a bridge too far for the others at the moment. Thanks.
Wade
I found a link from Mike Brind - should I use WebMatrix to build a real-world website?
I'd suggest that Web Pages as a framework is probably the best next step you can take, but I would also advise that at least one person in the team takes time to understand the basics behind the MVC pattern. You may decide it's too much for the majority of the team at the moment, and that's fair enough, but you can use your knowledge to plan the development of the Web Pages site so that it can be more easily converted to MVC at some stage in the future, should you decide that's the way to go.
The things I would look at (coming from a classic ASP background myself) are functions and helpers. Decide on a data access strategy - The Entity Framework works well with Web Pages and can be transferred to MVC easily. Avoid the Database helper. Use Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 for the Intellisense option.
As Knox said, you have the whole of the ASP.NET framework available to you so there should be no Web Pages specific "gotchas", and it's a massive step up from classic ASP.
I've been using Webmatrix/WebPages/Razor for a while now and like it. It's been a while since I used Classic ASP, but WebPages to me feels like a true successor to classic asp and what ASP.net should have been from the start. I'm actually moving most of my smaller sites to the WebPages framework from WebForms. Here are some things I've encountered.
I'm not sure if this is a gotcha or not, but I thought I would mention that with WebPages the scope of your variables may behave differently. I know a lot of Classic ASP sites that used to use include files to run snippets of code. Many of them depended on global variables set in the parent document. In WebPages, if you use RenderPage or Helpers to replace includes they run mostly outside of the Parent's scope. If you used Server.Execute instead of includes then you might not notice much difference, but if you did use includes and lots of global variables you may notice it.
Another possible gotcha is in ClassicASP <%=%> doesn't encode output, but in WebPages the Razor syntax # encodes output by default.
Another thing to consider is using C# vs VB.net with Webpages. Although vb.net works you'll find that most samples, tutorials and people in forums use C#.
Finally something that bothers me is that it is named the "webpages" framework. I've found it hard to do a good Google search using the term "webpages". Even "asp.net webpages" brings back mostly webform results. I have more success using "webmatrix" or "razor".
Can't recommend any documentation but here is an introduction to Web Matrix on mikesdotnetting.com blog where he has blogged quite a lot about Web Pages with Web Matrix.
We have two production sites, developed using Web Matrix. One serves our customers, the other is an intranet for our staff. They've been running in production for almost a year. I'd say about 95% of the sites were developed purely in WebMatrix IDE with about 5% going into Visual Studio, especially for the occassional obscure debugging. We're happy with WebMatrix / Web Pages. I didn't use WebForms because I was concerned about WebForm's ability to do really lightweight pages, since many of our users are using cellular data on iPads or iPhones. I didn't use MVC because of the additional complexity, since many of our pages are just showing the user read-only data from our production database. Because WebMatrix gives you access to the complete ASP.NET library, I haven't felt held back at all.
We are currently converting our ASP pages to Web Matrix. We tried to do conversions using WebForms a few years ago, only ending in frustration. After a small learning curve on the C# and Razor syntax, our development staff feel that we made a correct decision in going with Web Matrix.
Which is the best way to convert a .asp page to .aspx? Classic asp to asp.net.
I'm trying to avoid rewriting all the pages from scratch.
Thanks
I think it's a completely different language and you really can't avoid doing everything from scracth. I think that any solution other than starting all over would take just as much time and headache than starting from scratch.
It really depends on a lot of things. Mainly, how complicated the page is, and what it does. You will need to be a little more specific in your question, but there really isn't any single "one shot" solution.
My first shot at asp.net was migrating an asp application and there was and still is no straightforward migration path. The best that we found was so split the application up into functional areas then migrate each area - effectively running two apps with a bridge inbetween.
I always thought that ASP.Net was misnamed as it made it look like an upgrade to classic ASP which really don't believe it is. ASP.Net is more like an attempt to bring windows style programming to the web, abstracting away the stateless nature of the http request - certainly in it's webforms incarnation
If you are determined for a classic ASP style app you could include all the code on one page forgetting the page behind model though that would be unusual. If you can make decisions about the technology used you could consider MVC as conceptually at least it has more in common with ASP than the webforms. MVC admits it's a web app (like ASP) whereas webforms prefer to hide that fact under the covers.
Last week at Mix '09, the final version of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was released.
Some of the stated benefits of this framework are:
Clear separation of concerns
Testability - support for Test-Driven Development
Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
Intuitive URLs
Now, Microsoft are being careful to tout this as being "an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms", but given the advantages mentioned above, I'm wondering:
How long will it be until "classic" ASP.NET Web Forms is considered to be a "legacy" framework?
If you were kicking off the development of a new .NET web project today, why would you choose to use Web Forms instead of the ASP.NET MVC offering?
Good questions. I think ultimately, the answer is going to be the development team's expertise and the project needs that will decide that. ASP.NET web forms is so heavily used that it likely isn't going away anytime soon. Plus, there are so many custom controls and third-party support such as components and books. The main benefit of web forms is how easy it is to get a dynamic website up and going. It really is a RAD way of developing websites.
However, once that team has more experience with creating larger websites with much higher demands in terms of scalability, reliability, and test-ability, then they will look towards other solutions for that. In this case, they will realize that web forms are harder for unit-testing. They may also see that viewstates reduce performance and look for possible solutions.
Although MVC has the stated benefits, it is unlikely that anyone will convert their sites to use this new framework right away or ever. Plus, it requires the team to learn the new technology, and work out the new bugs. The team will have to learn new ways to do the exact same thing. For example, how easy is it to support uploading a file using MVC?
As I saw recently, there isn't a reason you can't create a site using MVC and web forms together. So you may see more hybrids in the near future. But I doubt that web forms will ever go away.
I kind of think about web forms like the way VB1 changed the way Windows applications are created on the desktop. To this day, the RAD way of creating application still exists and will never go away.
Keep in mind that MVC STILL uses WebForms for it's default View Engine. Sure, you can replace it with another one, but WebForms is still a core part of it.
Also, not everyone prefers to tightly control the HTML or the Routing. That's not my attitude, but some people just want their job done with the smallest effort.
And aren't .asmx Files technically part of the "old" Model as well? I can say for sure that a lot of people would not like to see them go away.
Still, I personally see ASP.net MVC becoming the main Web Engine for ASP.net in the future, although not in .net 4.0 yet.
You're asking when a newly-released web platform, ASP.NET MVC, will replace Web Forms, which has been around for seven years.
If we'd been crying out for ASP.NET MVC for the past seven years, then it wouldn't have taken seven years before ASP.NET MVC was released. The fact is, not everyone sees a need for this. Many of us have been creating complex, highly-scalable web applications for most of those seven years.
We even knew how to make them testable, and to separate presentation from business logic and data access. ASP.NET MVC may enforce this separation, but I've done it by using coding standards and code reviews, and by saying, "there's no unit test for that", and "get that business logic out of the UI".
Also, if I really needed more control of the HTML, I would write my own control to generate the HTML.
I do not believe WebForms will ever retire.
I've been using WebForms at work in business applications and MVC at home for some private things. Though I really like MVC I do not see how this could be possible to implement really complex UI logic with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It will quickly become unmanageable and will be quite unsecure since JavaScript can be switched off to prevent disabling some controls or hiding some information. On the contrary, turning off JavaScript with WebForms will virtually turn the page dead for any action, either authorized or not.
Both platforms will continue to evolve. For general web sites and HTML/CSS lovers MVC is a way to go, with complex applications you would want object-oriented architecture and artificial event handling even though it abstracts you from the stateless nature of HTTP.
So, pick up what is best for you.
P.S. Dropping WebForms altogether will jeopardize the future of numerous projects and companies throughout the world. Microsoft folks would not want to become an object of hatred and the trigger that started the third world war.
WebForms will still have a place for those that want a pseudo-stateless web application that they can easily put together by dragging and dropping. For those that don't have to or want to understand how HTTP works. It's the ultimate in RAD for web applications.
ASP.NET MVC on the other hands allows much more finer control at the cost of more responsibility. You get complete control over your HTML however that means you have to sanitize/encode your output yourself. Your application for the most part has to be completely stateless and for some ASP.NET WebForms/Windows WinForms developers that it's a bit hard to wrap their mind around.
I don't think either will ever dominate the other though one may be favored.
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 ...