Shawn Wildermuth recently wrote about his work with ASP.Net MVC. I’ve heard promising things about it, and listed are some of his points.
- How I would characterize my experience with ASP.Net MVC… two weeks of a steep learning curve then bliss.
- The big [fear] … is loss of ViewState. I was never a fan of ViewState and was always perplexed that most projects used WebControls and not nearly enough HtmlControls. HTTP is stateless so in many many situations remaining stateless makes more sense. Since the HTML controls were lighter weight I tended to use them much more often. That certainly makes my move to MVC easier as I am not bogged down by the loss of ViewState.
- MVC allows you to write code more like the web. This means doing a lot of AJAX and using jQuery (or Dojo, or whatever you want) as your UI layer.
- Since I was presenting information that is changing somewhat rapidly that I could develop it faster with ASP.Net MVC. Not faster in the initial implementation (because I had to learn MVC) but faster to add new functionality as it required it. I am not positive this is true but in the last few days I’ve been able to add new pieces of functionality to the site pretty easily. It feels a lot more modular than my other sites.
- The MVC code was mostly clean HTML (no magic ClientID’s or controls) so that integrating was simple.
