Why?
If you are developing stuff for the EPiServer CMS product, choosing between the two is a big thing these days. I think many EPiServer developers has felt left behind (myself included), being stuck with webforms when the rest of the world writes cool and awesome stuff with mvc and the frameworks that comes with it. I guess those poor SharePoint guys feel the same, don’t you think?
The times are different now. All of us can be cool these days (well, almost all of us. SharePoint will get there too some day).
Ok, so it’s about being cool?
Maybe. I would choose mvc because of one thing only: test driven development (tdd). Mvc is designed for that. Webforms isn’t. The rest is just style and preferences: design patterns, view engines, frameworks.
Is test driven development cool?
I think tdd is a great tool for helping you create both short term and long term value. The result will most likely be a product with nice and simple code. Nice & simple, as in easy to understand, maintain and refactor. Test driven development with webforms is mostly depressing. But hey, that is a different blog post.
Writing testable code, huh?
Well, I’m not really talking about just writing testable code. Don’t do that. Do test it & the code will follow. That's doing it the test driven way.
So who is the cool guy then, webforms or mvc?
I don’t know if anything used together with .NET and Visual Studio can be considered cool, really. We should probably check with @hipsterhacker or @neckbeardhacker about that. But don’t just settle with writing testable code with asp.net mvc. Without unit tests that proves it, the code base won’t probably be testable anyway.
So, without unit tests all that is left is choosing by style and preferences. Think about if that generates any value. Then make your decision on which way to go.
ps.
Check out my recent posts and videos on test driven development:
ds.
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