[...]... preview of ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET what? I had a look at the bits, and a few weeks later I even wrote one of the very first ­ rticles about a ASP.NET MVC for the DotNetSlackers Web site The article is still there (and mostly valid) at http://www.dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/AnArchitecturalViewOfTheASPNETMVCFramework aspx The taste of ASP.NET MVC was ­ ittersweet for me Overall, ASP.NET MVC seemed... project Moreover, ASP.NET MVC is much less forgiving than Web Forms and requires training, or at least s ­ elf-training In 10 years of using Web Forms, I’ve seen many professionals with limited programming skills produce effective Web front ends using data-bound controls and a bit of Microsoft Visual Basic This will not happen with ASP.NET MVC Worse yet, if you start writing ASP.NET MVC code taking the... are equivalent functionally and in terms of productivity But one of them (ASP.NET MVC) can help you write better code, faster This may not be the case today with ASP.NET MVC 2, but it likely will be the case with ASP.NET MVC 3 or 4 I don’t think that ASP.NET Web Forms will be dismissed very soon For example, rumors s ­ uggest that ASP.NET Web Forms will move decidedly toward increasing testability in... of some MVP support We’ll see, but as I see things ASP.NET MVC is and will remain far superior technically Although pushing a team to use ASP.NET MVC today on a project might be an arguable choice, pushing it within a software company isn’t an arguable choice at all Having a deep u ­ nderstanding of ASP.NET MVC makes you a better developer ASP.NET MVC is easy to pick up for junior developers who are... strict control over the markup ­ mitted e for each page This is an area where ASP.NET MVC is incomparably better than Web Forms, even when you take into consideration Microsoft s latest improvements to the ASP.NET 4 framework and your own programming self-discipline Every other argument being presented as a plus of ASP.NET MVC such as testability, separation of concerns, extensibility, and the like—is... This Book For? As explained in great detail in Chapter 1, “Goal of ASP.NET MVC and Motivation for Its Development,” ASP.NET Web Forms is showing the signs of age And ASP.NET MVC is an e ­ xcellent (although still incomplete) replacement My guess—my humble, two-cent guess—is that in a couple of years (and in a couple of versions) ASP.NET MVC will offer the same level of productivity as Web Forms—either... superseded by ASP.NET, classic ASP is today a dead end and survives only in legacy Web sites ASP.NET pages are based on compiled code written using first-class programming languages such as Microsoft C# and Visual Basic What was easy and effective to do with classic ASP turned out to be even easier and smoother with ASP.NET 6 Part I  The Programming Paradigm Productivity Is King The advent of ASP.NET represented... the Controls collection of the parent Page class with instances of server controls Chapter 1  Goals of ASP.NET MVC and Motivation for Its Development 15 Note  A detailed explanation of the ASP.NET page life cycle can be found in Chapter 3 of my p ­ revious ASP.NET book, Programming ASP.NET 3.5 (Microsoft Press, 2008) However, what’s i ­mportant here is to note that Web Forms page processing is fairly... Perl) as the programming language—you can easily conclude that PHP is an extremely popular Web ­ d ­ evelopment framework PHP and ASP.NET together have the lion’s share of the development market However, PHP and ASP.NET developed along independent paths and thus have quite different characteristics ASP.NET was devised to be the successor of classic ASP; in the newer flavor of ASP.NET MVC, some of the... tangibly) better than ASP.NET Web Forms? This is the fundamental question And it is still largely unanswered, to the point that I suspect that it can’t really have an answer xv xvi Introduction Although it’s based on the same runtime environment, ASP.NET MVC is significantly different from ASP.NET Web Forms It supports a radically different pattern MVC (actually the special flavor of MVC known as Model2) . Controller” Pattern 11 The ASP. NET Age of Reason 16 ASP. NET s Signs of Aging 16 The Turning Point 20 ASP. NET MVC at a Glance 26 ASP. NET MVC Highlights 26 Web Forms vs. ASP. NET MVC 30 Summary . . valid) at http://www.dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/AnArchitecturalViewOfTheASPNETMVCFramework .aspx. The taste of ASP. NET MVC was bittersweet for me. Overall, ASP. NET MVC seemed like an entire. in ASP. NET 401 Partial Rendering 402 Direct Scripting 405 AJAX in ASP. NET MVC 408 The JavaScript API 408 The Controller Façade 413 AJAX Helpers in ASP. NET MVC 420 Partial Rendering in ASP. NET MVC