Hear, hear.

I pretty much gave up on ASP.net when ASP.net Ajax came out – just too ridiculously complicated.

ASP.net was a fascinating idea and was very challenging to work with in a good way. But now its on its way out, perhaps we can go back to creating web pages.

“They all have their place.”

Yes, and the place of some technologies is in the bin (or a museum).

You seem to prove several points I’ve made in the past regarding ASP.NET and WebForms.

I’ve been doing web development since “Al Gore invented the Internet” I’ve written with notepad. I’ve used struts, I’ve used ASP 1.0 through 3.0. I’ve used ASP.NET.

They all have their place.

My point is not that it shouldn’t be used, but that there should be a business reason for using it.

Maybe where you work and for the people you develop for having super clean code without “munging” and “grit” is appropriate. It could be just as appropriate for another organization to stay with what is working because their business interest are skewed toward getting something up and running as quickly as possible.

No one tool is perfect simply because people want the tool to do different things. This goes just as much for ASP.NET MVC as it did for WebForms, Classic ASP, or Struts and Java Server Faces in the Java world.

I’ll give ASP.NET MVC this much, it’s a whole lot easier to use than Stuts ever was.

Well, here’s the thing, it’s not new at all. It’s quite old – it’s a model I was using in about 1999 with Delphi 3.0 and WebBroker, and MVC predates my first experience with it by a 20 years before that. It’s getting us back to where we *were* before WebForms turned up and tried to put a leaky abstraction on what was functioning quite well for most of us. It gets us back to HTTP, to understanding what HTTP as a platform is doing for you, and away from the page lifecyle subtle-bug-that-takes-a-week-to-nail horror, the ViewState weight, the almost-events-but-not-quite-isn’t-this-similar-to-Winforms-you-lost-looking-VB-guys marketing call.

WebForms is neither one thing nor the other; it’s not fully event-driven, because it can’t be (you can’t respond to a checked_changed event in the same way you could in Winforms/Win32 because you need a postback and then you get them all at once), and it tries to hide too much of what the web is about behind a desktop programming metaphor which is wholly unsuited to the task at hand. It obfuscates your markup and munges your IDs, which in an age of WCAG/Section 508 markup validation/accessibility and Web 2.0 JS front end niceties is just another piece of grit in the lubrication. It doesn’t try to prevent you from doing architecturally inappropriate things.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the novelty of WebForms at first. Over time I came to realise that it stands between you and your markup, and many times between you and your sanity.

So yes, there’s a learning curve with MVC (ASP.NET MVC or otherwise). I’d be willing to bet that once you’re at the top of that curve you’ll groan inwardly when confronted with a GridView with inline styling in your next gig…

I suppose there is still a need for traditional WebForm apps, but I’m not seeing it from where I sit. More and more web apps are moving toward AJAX models and I think that unless you are using Flash or Silverlight users are going to expect the type of interactivity you get from libraries like JQuery or ExtJS. And it seemed to me that trying to make that all work properly with Webforms was just one kludge after another. (Trust me, I tried to write my own ExtJs controls and also did a lot of my own code on top of the Coolite extensions and it was a major pain in the butt.)

I also think that with Ruby on Rails gaining popularity, more devs are being exposed to MVC and the “wonders” of it.

So I guess my opinion is: if you are a ASP.Net developer you should definitely learn MVC – even if you don’t need it now, you will want it later. And any architect that says you have to throw away your architecture and start over with a “new” technology needs to be shot.