Question

Diamonds is an ERP based on windows forms, I’m going to redevelop it using web technologies rather than Windows Forms ..

but now I need to decide which is best for this, the ASP.NET webforms (as i think) is easier to (design) i mean here the UI, but the mvc has simpler html output, and some other features …

can you help me decide which technology to use and why ?

I’m using C#,

Cheers

Answer 1

I think both technologies can get a bit complicated after getting past any of the basics. Here are some brief opinions that I gathered while having to implement a project that must live in both MVC and WebForms hosts.

WebForms Positives:

1. The maturity of the product
2. Lots of 3rd party support with regard to sophisticated controls
3. There are ways to get around the legacy-feeling aspects of the framework (e.g., WebForms MVP)

WebForms Negatives:

1. Page lifecycle issues can anger you to no end; there are a lot of moving parts to a sophisticated web application
2. Using dependency injection is “difficult” to use/implement
3. There is a lot in the framework that you can’t control
4. Need something like Reflector to dive into decompiled source when have questions that are not answered by documentation, web, experimentation.

MVC Positives:

1. Great separation of concerns and support of dependency injection
2. More control over so many things (i.e., project structure, mvc framework, rendered content, etc)
3. You can xcopy deploy your app along with the mvc framework on top of an asp.net 4 installation (i.e., to a 3rd party hosting provider)
4. Native support of JSON
5. Source code (w/ comments!!) provided so that you can dive into various features when you run into questions on the internals.
6. They’ve been doing out-of-band releases on tooling and I believe plan to do so on the framework (?); they have a futures project along with the source that shows you some of the directions they are going and which you could make use of if you should choose to.

MVC Negatives:

1. Can take a little time to wrap one’s mind around
2. Not as many 3rd party helpers (no controls); those that exist seem to be not as sophisticated as their WebForm counterparts

Personally, I’m an MVC fan because of the control, flexibility, and transparent dependency injection support. Perhaps you should do a small pilot with both technologies to see which one you prefer. Good luck and have fun!