It’s always a fun day when the man himself, ScottGu responds
to my email. Basically it all started last week at Techdays in
Toronto (pictures to follow, I promise).
Quite a few people asked me about MVC, and whether or not it will replace Web Forms.
My response was that it wouldn’t, but I didn’t have any tangible proof. I discussed
new features in .NET 4.0, and how the development is still going strong for future
releases. Some didn’t buy it.
So, earlier today I emailed Scott and asked him for proof. This was his response:
Hi Steve,
Web Forms is definitely not going away – we are making substantial improvements to
it with ASP.NET 4.0 (I’m doing a blog series on some of the improvements now).
ASP.NET MVC provides another option people can use for their UI layer – but it is
simply an option, not a replacement.
In terms of the dev team size, the number of people on the ASP.NET team working on
WebForms and MVC is actually about equal. All of the core infrastructure investments
(security, caching, config, deployment, etc) also apply equally to both.
Now, MVC is new. MVC is powerful. MVC is pretty freakin cool in what it
can do. But it won’t replace WebForms. Frankly, I like WebForms.
MVC does have it’s place though. I can see a lot benefits to using it.
It alleviates a lot of boilerplate code in certain development architectures, and
that is never a bad thing.
Long Live WebForms!