Question

I am trying to explain why it’s important to use MVC views over Form views within an MVC application. Some of the developers “expedite” work completion by adding form.aspx to the MVC project, technically using MVC but completely avoiding it. I think this is wrong because there isn’t a way I know of to do the following things:

1. Have a route target an older aspx form
2. Have a controller assemble a model and send it to an older aspx form

Is it wrong to expect the same productivity rate from MVC over older aspx forms?

I would think that a developer that knows both ways of development very well, that the time to create the same solution would be the same (or better) with Asp.net MVC.

Background: We develop website applications used by corporate entities to maintain weekly published data, which could be “yet another customer control panel” to add or change software features about once a month (for each customer, lots of customers, lots of applications, extremely similar patterns).

Answer 1

The time to create an MVC site correctly is in my opinion and experience always going to exceed the time it takes to create one incorrectly. The time advantage to using MVC correctly (or any design pattern for that matter) is not always seen in the initial implementation, it’s in the maintainability of the project, whether by the original developer or those who follow. Following good programming practices will result in long term time savings.

In terms of whether a pure MVC project is faster then a pure ASP.net project in terms of time to implement, it seems to me that the expectation could go either way, based on the developers experience, and on the applicability of the project itself to that framework.