With ASP.NET MVC in Release Candidate now, the technology is getting a lot of attention these days. I personally haven’t given it any greater thought until just recently, but I have to admit that I’m tempted towards a change. I like ASP.NET WebForms. I think the WebForm approach provides us with great manageability and gives us a very rich set of controls.

But one thing that I don’t like about WebForms is, that it abstracts the anatomy of the web and how the web works. This was probably done to lure WinForms developers towards web development and making the change as easy as possible. But I think developers learning ASP.NET WebForms is missing out on the core web technology that is request, responses and headers etc. If you don’t know the core elements of what you’re working with, you can easily make some terrible mistakes.

As user experience is getting much more focus today, especially in the business of SaaS products, you have to deliver a great deal of responsiveness through the use of AJAX. In ASP.NET WebForms I see myself ending up rendering the page once, and doing AJAX callback through the core XmlHttpRequest in JavaScript when the user makes a change to some data. That’s to avoid postbacks. By doing this, I’m missing out on ViewState as well and what is left of ASP.NET WebForms now?

I think the high demand of quality (Testability) and user experience (Responsiveness = AJAX) is making ASP.NET WebForms obsolete.

I see several good reasons to dump WebForms for MVC:

• - AJAX is used all over, so what good is postback, ViewState and the Page life cycle?
• - WebForms is making your HTML look very ugly, especially because of the ViewState hidden field.
• - ViewState can get very large, and slow down your pages.
• - Performance is better on MVC –> You can handle more requests per second.
• - The ability to test your code is better on MVC.

Initially, it looks like MVC is missing out on the rich set of controls that ASP.NET WebForms have. But I think this need will be driven by the awesome community that .NET have.