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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:56:22+00:00

When I first heard about StackOverflow, and heard that it was being built in

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When I first heard about StackOverflow, and heard that it was being built in ASP.Net MVC, I was a little confused. I thought ASP.Net was always an example of an MVC architecture. You have the .aspx page that provides the view, the .aspx.vb page that provides the controller, and you can create another class to be the model. The process for using MVC in ASP.Net is described in this Microsoft article.

So my question is. What Does ASP.Net MVC provide that you wouldn’t be able to do with regular ASP.Net (even as far back as ASP.Net 1.1)? It is just fancy URLs? Is it just for bragging rights for MS to be able to compare themselves with new technologies like Ruby On Rails, and say, ‘We can do that too’? Is there something more that ASP.Net MVC actually provides, rather than a couple extra templates in the File->New menu?

I’m probably sounding really skeptical and negative right now, so I’ll just stop. But I really want to know what ASP.Net MVC actually provides. Also, if anybody can tell me why it’s Model-View-Controller and not in order of the layers of View-Controller-Model or Model-Control-View depending on whether you are going top to bottom, or vice versa, I’d really appreciate that too.

EDIT

Also, it’s probably worth pointing out that I’ve never really cared for the web forms (AKA server controls) model either. I’ve only used it minimally, and never on the job.

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  1. .aspx doesn’t fulfill the MVC pattern because the aspx page (the ‘view’) is called before the code behind (the ‘controller’).

    This means that the controller has a ‘hard dependency’ on the view, which is very much against MVC principles.

    One of the core benefits of MVC is that it allows you to test your controller (which contains a lot of logic) without instantiating a real view. You simply can’t do this in the .aspx world.

    Testing the controller all by itself is much faster than having to instantiate an entire asp.net pipeline (application, request, response, view state, session state etc).

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