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July 29, 2008 at 12:09 pm
It depends on the quality of your developers, and how much time you want to spend dealing with customization. Web Forms is a big abstraction and is great when you want to just knock code out, but starts to fall short when you want complete control. When you want complete control, you could care less if you don’t have 3rd party controls, because you are creating everything from the ground up anyway. All that abstraction just creates more hoops to jump through because you aren’t taking advantage of anything it enables.
MVC is really for the teams that want entire control of their application’s output, so you shouldn’t use it unless you dislike having a lot of controls in there doing magic that you have no control over. If you are really planning on doing a lot of custom CSS / AJAX work and are very comfortable with the inner workings of the web, you might find the freedom MVC gives to be pretty liberating… but don’t do it unless you plan on and enjoy thinking about details like the individual HTML tags that get generated and what their IDs are.
July 29, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Jesse, those are good points. I think ASP.NET MVC and MVC in general is about more than just control, although that plays a big role. Testability, built in support for IoC containers, a formalized separation of concerns, the tremendous weight loss achieved by dumping View State are also important considerations. I would almost say that if you want to realize an architecture for your app that DOES cleanly and intelligently keep business logic or data access out of your business layers you’re developers need *more* experience and discipline if they are using ASP.NET WebForms than if they are using MVC, because in WebForms it is extremely easy for business logic and data access concerns to start creeping into bed with the view logic if you aren’t very careful. I also tend to believe that the abstraction of Web Forms won’t keep you safe from HTML – unless you’re building some intranet app that is little more than scaffolding over a database – I’ve spent as much time tweaking HTML tags using classic ASP.NET as writing server side code, and even more time than that worrying about the ID’s that were generate 🙂 ). Not to say ASP.NET WebForms don’t have their merits or that the abstraction isn’t useful in many cases, just that there may be more to consider than just if (ControlFreak) MVC else (ClassicAspNet).
July 29, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I think you are right on with that.
July 29, 2008 at 1:00 pm
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July 30, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Nathan, good post. Lot’s of links which I’ll have to check out later. Are you on twitter? http://twitter.com/mehulharry
July 30, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Harry, not a tweeter. I opened an account once, but the only thing it really did for my was disrupt my ability to concentrate even more than my RSS reader and e-mail already manage to do 🙂 So are you guys working on some MVC stuff over there at DX?
July 31, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Very nice article, Nathan. There are a lot of useful links in this especially for newbies in ASP.NET MVC like me.
Thanks for posting.