This discussion comes at a coincidentally interesting time for me, as over recent years I have become increasingly irritated by classic ASP.NET. The controls are just so heavyweight and the lifecycle of events and postbacks is so tangled that you need a doctorate in topology to follow it. All of the problems I have ever suffered usually boil down to fighting or misunderstanding the huge infrastructure that wraps up such a simple concept as a http request. Lord knows how many times I've made a subtle mistake in Load, CreateChildControls, PreRender, Render, event handlers, etc, causing composite controls or repeater controls to produce gibberish. And then there is the misery of trying to integrate JavaScript into the machinery.
I was just about to visit bookware and buy two fat ASP.NET MVC 4 books, obviously because I'm considering that as an alternative. I've read about the differences between the frameworks and I've run some tutorials and can see immediately that MVC takes you closer to the wire and gives you more control over rendering, with the penalty that you have to do more work. So I'm wondering if there is anyone here who has migrated to MVC 3/4 successfully and happily? Is it just substituting one huge complex framework for another huge complex one which simply changes the problems from one set to another? I worry about the number of files in a large MVC project. Are there tools or techniques to integrate scripting more easily? What about emitting html that is cross-browser safe or standards compliant? Will MVC make these things easier than in class ASP.NET? Should I give up on ASP.NET completely and use something like the GTK or the confusing family of similar tools to use html5? Can I leave the ASP.NETworld totally behind and go this way for rich and interactive web sites? Has anyone gone this way? Is it just a new form of suffering? Greg K
