Farewell, ASP.NET Web Forms, We Hardly Knew Ye

ASP.NET Web Forms, the venerable web framework that Microsoft shipped with the .NET framework almost 15 years ago and we all hate love, is going away. Yes, it’s official: ASP.NET 5 will not include Web Forms, only MVC 6. ASP.NET 4.6, however, will still include Web Forms, including some updates, but the future appears to be all MVC (and OWIN, for that matter). Having spend a lot of my professional life working with Web Forms, I feel kind of sad. Yes, I do acknowledge event-hell, viewstate-hell, etc, but I find it easy to get around this once you know a thing or two. But what I really like about Web Forms is the reuse capacity that server-side controls offer: just add a reference to an assembly containing controls, register them in Web.config or in the page, and you’re done. A control encapsulates both client and server-side logic, so it is the perfect reusability mechanism for the web, in my opinion, and I wrote tens of posts on it. MVC now offers somewhat similar mechanisms, in the form of view components and tag helpers, but before that, there was really no reuse mechanism – partial views cannot be referenced from an assembly and helper methods cannot be extended. Don’t get me wrong: I like MVC, but I think that Web Forms was complementary. Taking in consideration the extensibility mechanisms offered by MVC, I can imagine that someone will even implement Web Forms on top of it! Winking smile

Apart from Web Forms, ASP.NET 5 seems promising! I published recently an article on it for the portuguese magazine Programar, which you can find here. I may translate it to english and add a thing or two in the next couple of days, so stay tuned!

                             

7 Comments

  • Could you elaborate (perhaps another post) on view components and tag helpers for sharing code between assemblies?

  • Chaz:
    Sure! These are, IMO, great additions to ASP.NET. I will cover them soon.

  • Asp.net web forms will never have a sunset..

    If we achieve the same result without using asp.net mvc and just with pure html5 and jquery, will mvc have a farewell? It is not so.

    Over the period of time Microsoft has created so many design patterns including webforms, mvc, spa etc to arrive the same solution.

    asp.net 5 was specifically done for mvc. Asp.net is the technology and both web forms and mvc are just design patterns.

    Microsoft has plans to invest more on web forms and it will continue to exist till .Net is exist.

  • Agreed. a developer point of view, reuse capacity was a big thing.

  • Web forms made some things easier.Many windows developers were able to transition to developing web applications courtesy of web forms.But its time to move on to leaner MVC!

  • https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-microsoft-bring-back-web-forms-hate-mvc

    Sign Petition to Save Web Form

    I hate MVC , if you hate MVC and don't want to manage "state" of a god damn drop down and waste your day with mishmash classic asp type code , lets get Rid of MVC

    I hate MVC

  • https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-microsoft-bring-back-web-forms-hate-mvc

    Sign Petition to Save Web Form

    I hate MVC , if you hate MVC and don't want to manage "state" of a god damn drop down and waste your day with mishmash classic asp type code , lets get Rid of MVC

    I hate MVC

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