1. Asp.net Mvc
Brandon D’Imperio
bdimpe@gmail.com
Imaginarydevelopment.com
Imaginarydevelopment.blogspot.com

2. What’s wrong with WebForms?
• Web Forms allow developers to rapidly create applications simply by dragging and dropping
controls and handling page-level events for both the page and the controls on the page. This
works well, but it’s a high-level of abstraction and many developers completely forget—or
never learned—how the HTML layout actually works behind the scenes. As a result, it’s
common to end up with non-validating HTML, or bloated and hard-to-manage HTML layout
that is very designer unfriendly. Add to that a huge amount of ViewState if you don’t
effectively manage ViewState properly and you can easily end up with pages that are much
bigger than they need to be and slow as molasses.
• One downside of the Web Forms framework is that behind this abstraction layer, Microsoft
built a very complex engine that has many side effects in the Page pipeline. If you’ve ever built
complex pages that contain many components on the page it can sometimes get very difficult
to coordinate the event sequence for data binding, rendering, and setup of the various
controls at the correct time in the page cycle. Do you load data in the Init, Load or PreRender
events or do you assign values during postback events? Web Forms need to run through a
single server-side form so they can’t easily be broken up into smaller logical units. In complex
forms, event handlers can get very bulky with the tasks they need to handle and often in ways
that can’t be easily refactored so you end up with code that is difficult to maintain and
impossible to test.
– Rick Strahl – MVP since 1997

3. Webforms?

4. Who uses MVC?
• StackOverflow.com
– Serves 1.4-1.5 million hits per day. (as of May, 2010)
– A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer
site for programmers. Questions and answers displayed by user votes
and tags.
– Alexa traffic ranked 465, 451 in the US, and 212 in India
• It's no coincidence that many of the most popular web
programming frameworks also encapsulate MVC principles:
Django, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Struts, and so forth. It's also
officially creeping into ASP.NET under the fledgling ASP.NET
MVC project. – Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com May,2008

5. MVC vs webforms
• ASP.net MVC
– Enables the full control over the rendered HTML.
– Provides clean separation of concerns(SoC).
– Enables Test Driven Development (TDD).
– Easy integration with JavaScript frameworks.
– Following the design of stateless nature of the web.
– RESTful urls that enables SEO.
– No ViewState and PostBack events
• Lightweight/faster
– No Codebehind
• ASP.net Web Forms
– It provides RAD development
– Easy development model for developers coming from winform
development.

6. MVC + webforms
• You can intermix the two
• Use MVC for routing, separation, more
javascript/jQuery friendliness
• Use webforms for complex controls that you
are attached to or are just better for the
situation.
• Both use some T4 style-coding

7. What is M.V.C?
• Model – The classes which are used to store
and manipulate state, typically in a database
of some kind.
• View – Your application’s presentation code or
layer
• Controller – Wires up your model to your
View/presentation/public interface (winforms,
web pages, web services, soap, rest, etc..)

8. How does it work?

9. Web forms flow vs. MVC flow

10. Asp.net MVC with routing
User does a Get or Post to the routing
system. The routing system tries to
find a route match, and creates an
instance of the appropriate controller.
Then it invokes the Action on the
controller.
The controller invokes methods on the
model, which passes back any relevant
data used in response.
The controller then usually locates the
view and renders the view using the
data from the model (in many cases
transformed or flattened in a
ViewModel or in the controller) .

11. Sample Layout
• Controllers
– Define your externally
visible methods/URLs
• Models
– Your Core code +
persistence
• Views
– Pages to render
• Global.asax (not pictured)
– Defines routes, and other
app-startup code

12. References
• What’s Ailing Asp.Net Web Forms – Rick Strahl
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/
understanding-model-view-controller.html
• http://www.aspiringcraftsman.com/2007/08/i
nteractive-application-architecture/