ASP.NET Web Forms vs. MVC

ASP.NET offers two primary development patterns for creating Web sites: Web Forms and Model-View-Controller (MVC). Choosing a pattern depends on several factors, and in some cases it may be appropriate to use both in the same Web site. Although MVC is newer, Microsoft will continue to offer and improve on tooling and features of both patterns.

The Web Forms pattern was originally the only choice when developing with ASP.NET. It uses a control- and event-based programming model similar to the original Visual Basic, in which developers use a designer to add controls to a form and write code to handle the events (e.g., entering data into a text box or clicking a button) associated with these controls. Web Forms’ server-side controls encapsulate HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and handle data binding, reducing code writing requirements for developers. The server side HTML, script, and .NET code can also be modified in the IDE. When the form is requested on a deployed Web site by a browser user, its file is loaded, its server-side script and controls are run, and HTML and client-side script are generated and returned to the client. The primary benefit of Web Forms has been to lower the barrier to developing Web applications by implementing an event-driven programming model familiar to many developers from PC programming. SharePoint Server also uses Web Forms for site development, so departmental sites that rely on SharePoint should use the Web Forms pattern.