Question

I’m thinking about going into the ASP.NET MVC scene.

I’ve seen the videos at http://asp.net/learn, but they havn’t impressed me.

So can you answer me, what makes MVC ‘so impressive’, and why does it make life better and easier?

Answer 1

ASP.NET MVC is much more in tune with the technology on which it is layered. ASP.NET Forms attempted to pretend that there was a nice fat stateful infrastucture as there is in a standard WinForms app. However HTTP and Web servers do not like fat stateful applications.

ASP.NET MVC allows for a separation of concerns. The request is processed by a controller not a ‘Web Page’, it chooses how to respond and what UI is needed to present that response. The controller builds the set of structured data needed by its choice of view then hands over that data to the view.

This division allows much easier testing, the view is merely a means to present what should be a complete well munged chunk of data. Its way easier to build a test for something which takes structured data in and responds with structured data.

ASP.NET Forms is almost impossible to test in this way (especially without expensive tools claiming to achieve it). Hence an MVC application is easier to get right and much easier to ensure it stays right by consistently running existing tests.

Caveat: The major draw back of ASP.NET MVC right now is lack of solid documentation. I’ve been assured that docs are coming ‘soon’.