ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms -- Shaping the Future of the Web

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Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC there is a constant buzz to evaluate its features and compare it with traditional Web Forms development. This article compares both these frameworks to help the developer community decide the use of appropriate framework while working on actual projects. Introduction ASP.NET Web Forms development is a rich and matured technology for web development on the Microsoft platform. It allows quick development, rich user interface and rapid adaptability by na�ve developers. Developers get WYSIWYG kind of designer support right in the development environment. But this ease of usage brings certain issues from maintainability, testability and performance-related point of views. Due to new expectations from web applications and better control over the content, Microsoft's focus has changed a little bit, and now we have an alternative. ASP.NET MVC is a new programming paradigm in web application development and is as revolutionary as ASP.NET itself was a decade ago. The first version of the MVC 1.0 was released in March 2009 where it was a separate installer. Microsoft is so backing on to MVC as the next big thing in the web development arena that they have not only made MVC 2 part of .NET framework 4.0, but also made it open source, http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742, like the AJAX toolkit. So you can download the MVC source code and suggest improvements and at the same time have custom implementation, since you have the power of entire source code. The latest preview of MVC 3 is available @ http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50092