ASP.NET MVC vs Web Forms

www.credera.com About the Speaker  Thiago Silva is a software and business intelligence consultant, based out of Dallas Texas. He is an architect for the Microsoft practice at Credera in Dallas and has helped several clients implement custom software, SharePoint, business intelligence, and reporting solutions using .NET and SQL Server technologies.  Thiago is co-author of the book "Professional SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services" by Wrox Publishing, and contributor on the book "Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports".  You can visit his blog, Silvaware, at http://silvaware.net, and follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/tafs7Copyright © 2011 Credera. -2- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Agenda  MVC – The Good Stuff – The Bad Not So Good Stuff  Web Forms is dead! Long live Web Forms! – The Good Stuff – The Bad Not So Good Stuff  ASP.NET – The Platform…THEY MEET IN THE MIDDLE!  MVC Takes On Web Forms – High Level feature comparison – Detailed feature comparison  MVC Learning Curve  Show me the code!Copyright © 2011 Credera. -3- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC 101  Software Architectural Pattern (NOT A FRAMEWORK)  First described, using Smalltalk, in 1979 by Trygve Reenskaug, Xerox PARC  Isolates domain logic from UI/Presentation  Popular in Java and Ruby Web Frameworks Controller View ModelCopyright © 2011 Credera. -4- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC – The Good Stuff  Mature and Widely Adopted – tried and true  Fosters adoption of best practices and patterns – Separation of Concerns – Unit Testing/TDD and Mocking – Loosely coupled tiers – Highly maintainable code  Better code organizationCopyright © 2011 Credera. -5- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC – The Bad Not So Good Stuff  Requires deeper experience in architectural patterns and well-rounded web development topics: – TDD/unit testing – S.O.L.I.D. – HTML/CSS/JavaScript  Does not closely resemble Windows Forms development so the learning curve is steeper for non-web developers  Might be overkill if… – speed of development is essential – application is simple and smallCopyright © 2011 Credera. -6- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Web Forms Is Dead! Long Live Web Forms!  OH: “now that Microsoft has ASP.NET MVC, they are going to stop supporting Web Forms”….FALSE!  Web Forms is very much alive and with a new release, in .NET4. Here are some new features: – Extensible Output Caching – Out of Proc Session State Compression – Extensible Request Validation – Extensible Object Caching – Better control over ViewState – URL Routing Support (vanity URLs = SEO!) – Better control over generated server control IDs in HTML (for easier JavaScript access) – Improved HTML rendering of controls for support of web standards and accessibilityCopyright © 2011 Credera. -7- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Web Forms - The Good Stuff  Rapid Development (RAD) – Drag and drop controls provide an abstraction layer over CSS, JS, and HTML. – Speeds up time from prototype to final product  Simulates Statefulness – Viewstate, postbacks, control events, and page lifecycle, all aim to simulate a stateful model on top of an inherently stateless HTTP protocol. – Allows developers without deep HTML and JS knowledge to write effective applications.  Maturity – Web Forms is stable, mature, and is fully supported by third party controls and tools (e.g. Ajax control toolkit, Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, etc.)Copyright © 2011 Credera. -8- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Web Forms - The Bad Not So Good Stuff  Abstraction from HTML – Hinders integration with Javascript frameworks (e.g. jQuery). – Postback model and ViewState can make it hard for search engines to rank Web Forms pages higher due to payload size.  Difficult to adopt practices such as Separation of Concerns – History has shown that the Web Forms model does not lend itself naturally to SOC. – Because framework does not lend itself well to SOC, developers must make a bigger effort to stick to best practices and patterns.  Difficult To Unit Test – A monolithic runtime environment exposed as sealed classes is hard/impossible to test (mock).Copyright © 2011 Credera. -9- All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com ASP.NET – The Platform…THEY MEET IN THE MIDDLE! Since both MVC and Web Forms share the same underlying platform, they can take advantage of the same goodness that’s available in ASP.NET:  HTTP Request  Roles  Health Monitoring  HTTP Response  Master Pages  Process Model  URL Routing  Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX  Tracing  Session State  jQuery  Caching  Localization  Profiles  Configuration  Security  Compilation  Membership  DeploymentCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 10 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC Takes On Web Forms – a Feature Comparison Feature Web Forms MVC Server Controls * ViewState Unit Testing Full HTML Control Page Lifecycle Separation of Concerns Support for JavaScript Rapid Application Development Windows Forms paradigm * MVC Server controls are implemented as lightweight HTML helper extension methods, and render simple HTML and JavaScript. They do not actually maintain state or contain any server side event/lifecycle.Copyright © 2011 Credera. - 11 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC Takes On Web Forms – Detailed Comparison Feature MVC Web Forms SEO Out of box MVC URLs are Web Forms can be made to work SEO friendly with friendly URLs by manual processes involving URL rewrites and server transfers Development Requires more design Code-behind is more familiar, and separation of and often more easily utilized as concerns, which can be the code can directly control cause for more up from page output (e.g. calling a effort, but better long property on a server control) term maintenance Separation of Concerns Inherent in the Can be achieved by diligence and architecture processCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 12 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC Takes On WebForms – Detailed Comparison Feature MVC WebForms Unit Testing Easy to test the model More difficult because code- and controller, as they behind is not required to be- are de-coupled by the decoupled from the form nature of the architecture Open Source Libraries NuGet facilitates easy use Integrating open source, third of open source, third party libraries is a more manual party libraries, and process JavaScript libraries are more easily utilized HTML / Page Weight More control over the More difficult to control HTML HTML, easier to build because controls and server lightweight, HTML rendering may be out of compliant pages developer’s controlCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 13 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC Learning Curve  Putting data on a page – Need to stop thinking in terms of telling controls what to do. – In MVC, you think in terms of providing a model that contains all the data a page needs (a “View Model”). – A given view specifies/defines what model data it needs to display and in what way.  Postbacks – No support for “classic” postbacks. – You must post to a controller action in MVC. – MVC does not consider any URL as the endpoint to a physical server resource.  ViewState – This concept does not exist in MVC. – You are responsible for populating and repopulating form data. – Model binder and view models provide help with this.Copyright © 2011 Credera. - 14 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com MVC Learning Curve – even more stuff Platform Paradigm Parallels…(say that 5 times in a row!) WebForms MVC  Controls ≈  Html Helpers  Code Behind ≈  Controller  Events ≈  Routes and Methods  User Controls ≈  Partial Views  Master Pages =  Master Pages and Shared ViewsCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 16 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Demo Links  Silk Project – MileageStats MVC3 and jQuery demo – http://silk.codeplex.com  MVC Music Store – an end-to-end MVC3 and EF4.1 Tutorial and Demo app – http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com  Ayende’s Raccoon Blog Engine – open source blog engine using MVC3 and RavenDB – https://github.com/ayende/raccoonblog  nopCommerce – an open-source e-commerce solution built with MVC3 – http://www.nopcommerce.com  Orchard CMS – an open-source CMS built using MVC3, by Microsoft – http://www.orchardproject.netCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 18 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Final Thoughts… “ I often find debates around programming model appropriateness and abstractions a little silly. Both Web Forms and MVC are programming web framework abstractions, built on top of a broader framework abstraction, programmed with higher level programming languages, running on top of a execution engine abstraction that itself is running on top of a giant abstraction called an OS. What you are creating with each is HTML/CSS/JavaScript (all abstractions persisted as text, transmitted over HTTP – another higher level protocol abstraction).” --Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft http://weblogs.asp.net/scottguCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 19 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Credera is a Business and Technology Consulting Firm that Focuses on Leveraging Proven Technologies to Enable our Clients Business Strategy  Our Company  Our People – Full-service business and technology – Credera’s professionals possess a unique consulting firm combination of deep technical expertise with extensive business backgrounds – Provide business and technology solutions that offer measurable value to our clients – Backgrounds include business, technology, and strategy management consulting with some of the – Deliver value by leveraging our people’s most well-known and respected consulting firms accumulated industry and management in the world experience with their deep technical expertise – Have served many influential corporations in a variety of industries over the past 20 years – Established in 1999 – Offices in Dallas, Austin, Denver  Sample Clients  Our Services – Management Consulting – Technology Solutions – Business IntelligenceCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 20 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Coming Up… Dallas Day of Dot Net Presents… Scott Hanselman March 9-10, 2012 http://dodn2012.eventbrite.com/Copyright © 2011 Credera. - 21 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

www.credera.com Q&A Thank you for attending! Contact Information: Thiago Silva tsilva@credera.com www.credera.com Twitter: @tafs7 Blogs: http://blogs.credera.com/ http://silvaware.netCopyright © 2011 Credera. - 23 - All Rights Reserved. T H E P O W E R O F P E R S P E C T I V E

ASP.NET MVC vs Web Forms

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