When Written: June 2010
I’m often asked by readers which is the best way to develop asp .net applications, should one use the traditional Web Forms method or the newer MVC (Model View Controller)? The first thing to remember here is that they are not mutually exclusive nor is one going to be better supported in the future by Microsoft, both are equally valid methods of application development.
Let’s take a brief look at the differences. In its simplest form, in MVC the Model module manages the data and might be a database but doesn’t have to be. The Controller module handles the business logic whilst the View module handles the display of the data. Now whilst you can even combine MVC and Web Forms within the same project, Web forms take a lot of the coding work away from you and deals with a lot of the browser differences by using server-side controls that generate the HTML.
If however you want full control of the HTML generated then MVC is the way to go, and is extremely extensible, but be prepared for a considerable amount of more coding depending on your application. Both are fully supported and will continue to be so according to Microsoft. SharePoint applications are built on the Web Forms model for example.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton