The dead-end of Web Forms
I had a talk last week at BASTA about ASP.NET MVC vs. Web Forms and I repeat the same talk today here in London at Software Architect conference. (Well, repeating a session is a big term for me--I'll never be able to repeat the same session the same way two or more times...).
The key question that people ask, the only answer they want to hear, is about which one is preferable to use for the next project. Clearly, the natural answer would be a classic "It depends". My rule of thumb is fairly simple
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If ASP.NET works for you, then stay with it.
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If you start complaining about limitations you experience (not limitations others say you are experiencing), then look ahead.
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Once you decided to take the plunge into ASP.NET MVC go ahead and never hesitate. If you seem not understanding it very well, study it more.
When introduced, Web Forms was a cutting edge solution and it just engineered current best practices. But it was ten years ago. We could argue whether it was the right choice to engineer ASP practices ten years ago. In fact, more or less at the same time Sun did it differently when they architected JSP.
There's not much more you can expert or achieve with Web Forms than you do today. OK, tomorrow, with version 4. This is the dead-end of Web Forms.
If it doesn't serve you any more the way you like, change it. It will be a change for the better. But the better is also different and requires a different approach and skills. Design is design, and with ASP.NET MVC (which is far from perfection, by the way...), you need to gain design and architecture skills.
My next book is just on ASP.NET MVC (February 2010) and will target version 2. Like many other books of mine it won't be an how-to book. And I'm taking architecture and design very seriously as I explain controllers, views and models. Stay tuned. And plan your design training :) Contact me... ha ha ha Smile.