I’ve heard a lot of concerns from
people worried that the ASP.NET team will stop sparing resources and support
for Web Forms in favor of ASP.NET MVC in the future. I thought I would try to
address that concern in this post based on my own observations.
At the PDC, a few people
explicitly told me, not without a slight tinge of anger, that they don’t get
ASP.NET MVC and they like Web Forms just fine thank you very much. Hey man,
that’s totally cool with me! Please don’t make me the poster boy for killing
Web Forms. If you like Web Forms, it’s here to stay. ;)
I can keep telling you that we’re continuing to invest in Web Forms until my face is blue, but that
probably won’t be convincing. So I will instead present the facts and let you
draw your own conclusions.
ASP.NET
Themes
If you watch the ASP.NET
4.0 Roadmap talk at PDC,
you’ll see that there are five main areas of investment that the ASP.NET team
is working on. I’ll provide a non-comprehensive brief summary of the five here.
Core
Infrastructure
With our core infrastructure,
we’re looking to address key customer pain points and improve scale and
performance.
One feature towards this goal is
cache extensibility which will allow plugging in other cache products such as
Velocity as a cache provider. We’ll also enhance ASP.NET Session State APIs.
There are other scalability investments I don’t even personally understand all
too deeply. ;)
Web Forms
In WebForms, we’re looking to
address Client IDs which allow developers to control the id attribute value
rendered by server controls. We’re adding support for URL routing with Web
Forms. We’re planning to improve ViewState management by providing fine grain
control over it. And we’re making investments in making our controls more CSS
friendly. There are many other miscellaneous improvements to various control
we’re making that would require me to query and filter the bug database to
list, and I’m too lazy to do that right now.
AJAX
With Ajax, we’re implementing
client side templates and data binding. Our team now owns the Ajax Control
Toolkit so we’re looking at opportunities to possibly roll some of those server
controls into the core framework. And of course, we’ve added jQuery to our
offerings along with jQuery Intellisense.
Data and
Dynamic Data
In Dynamic Data (which
technically could fall in the Web Forms bucket) we’re looking to add support
for an abstract data layer which would allow for POCO scaffolding. We’re
implementing many-to-many relationships, enhanced filtering, enhanced
meta-data, and adding new field templates.
There’s a lot of cool stuff happening
here. To get more details on this, check outScott
Hunter’s Dynamic
Data talk at PDC.
ASP.NET
MVC
We’re still working on releasing
1.0. In the future, we hope to leverage some of the Dynamic Data work into
ASP.NET MVC.
Notice here that ASP.NET MVC is just one of these five areas
we’re investing in moving forward. It’s not somehow starving our efforts in
other areas.
Feature
Sharing
One other theme I’d like to
highlight is that when we evaluate new features, we try and take a hard look at
how it fits into the entire ASP.NET architecture as a whole, looking both at
ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms. In many cases, we can share the bulk of the
feature with both platforms with a tiny bit of extra work.
For example, ASP.NET Routing was
initially an ASP.NET MVC feature only, but we saw it could be more broadly
useful and it was shared with Dynamic Data. It will eventually make its way
into Web Forms as well. Likewise, Dynamic Data started off as a Web Forms
specific feature, but much of it will make its way into ASP.NET MVC in the
future.
Conclusions
It’s clear that ASP.NET MVC is
getting a lot of attention in part because it is shiny and new, and you know
how us geeks loves us some shiny new toys. Obviously, I don’t believe this is
the only reason it’s getting attention, as there is a lot of goodness in the
framework, but I can see how all this attention tends to skew perceptions
slightly. To put it in perspective, let’s look at the reality.
Currently, ASP.NET MVC hasn’t
even been released yet. While the number of users interested in and building on
ASP.NET MVC is growing, it is clearly a small number compared to the number of
Web Form developers we have.
Meanwhile, we have millions of
ASP.NET developers productively using Web Forms, many of whom are just fine
with the Web Form model as it meets their needs. As much as I love the ASP.NET
MVC way of doing things, I understand it doesn’t suit everyone, nor every
scenario.
So with all this investment going
on, I hope it’s clear that we are continuing to invest in Web Forms along with
the entire ASP.NET framework.
