Microsoft's MVC framework means you'll need to rethink your WebForm world

With the advent of Microsoft’s new MVC framework for ASP.NET I think there will be a fairly significant impact on developers who have come to rely heavily on WebForms and related controls. I believe the new framework will require a significant "rethink" of how applications and controls are developed. If you watch Scott Hanselman’s video you’ll see he uses Rob Conery’s Mvc.ToolKit to flesh out the UI and notice that it doesn’t use the designer nor web controls at all.

The MVC framework is clearly going to change how the VS.NET web form designer will be used and certainly makes it less important. It will be interesting to follow the evolution of the framework and to see how MS updates the designer and code editor to fit this new (as in new to MS) model. It will also be interesting to see how 3rd party control companies like Telerik and Developer Express respond.

While at CodeGear I had frequent discussions with Jim Tierney (who I co-developed Delphi’s ASP.NET designer with) about moving Delphi’s designer away from being a WebForm centric because of the development costs involved and instead focus more on the code editing experience. I think the MVC style of development does just that and I expect Microsoft to come up with a number of improvements to the framework and tooling to better support it. I’ll be curious to watch what this means for Delphi’s ASP.NET support.

One thing I think is particularly interesting is with WebForms out of the way ASP.NET developers will be in a better position to leverage non-Microsoft AJAX frameworks such as Dojo, Prototype etc. etc.

Kudos to Microsoft for following through on this much needed alternative to WebForms!

Comments [6]

permalink Posted @ 12:10PM

Thursday, December 20, 2007 12:52:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I've been very excited about ASP.NET MVC, it really feels like a breath of fresh air for developing web apps, I even compared it to the same feeling I got when I went from VB to Delphi back in the day.

It'll be interesting to see the balancing act Microsoft pulls off. On one hand you have the developers that only know WebForms, server controls, view state, postback (honestly all the things that I disliked about ASP.NET) while on the other you have the purists from the Rails community that feel they have more of a "right" to MVC and that it only works well with dynamic languages. It really does remind me of that sweet spot that Delphi hit between VB (WebForms) and C++ (Rails).

Shawn Oster

Thursday, December 20, 2007 1:25:55 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Shawn,
I couldn't agree with you more. I think for hard-core web developers MVC represents the sweet spot and frees you from all the things wrong with WebForms.

Steve Trefethen

Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:09:14 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Steve,
Are you aware of any books published on ASP.NET MVC to learn it the formal way? I enjoyed ROR (by black) it was simple.

Shankar

Friday, December 21, 2007 6:49:35 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Shankar,
None that I'm aware of. I think it's a bit too early for book to be appearing specifically discussing MS' implementation WRT ASP.NET. The blogs to watch are:

ScottGu
Phill Haack (MVC PM)
Scott Hanselman
Rob Conery

Steve Trefethen

Friday, December 21, 2007 8:37:44 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Hi Steve,
nice article. I think for enterprise application we will use WebForms, but for new project MVC is the best.

Ivan Atanasov

Sunday, March 15, 2009 8:07:16 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

Its good to read about Microsoft’s new MVC framework for ASP.NET. But i need to have detailed study on this.Guide me if possible.
thanks.

SHort Jokes

Comments are closed.