Webforms vs MVC (London .NET User Group)

100 people listened to Sebastien Lambla and Phil Wistanley at the Microsoft customer centre in Victoria. They talked for 2 hours without a break. Two hours is a long time but the formula they adopted was entertaining and fun. Seb was supporting MVC, Phil Webforms. They kept rotating at the mike, going through humorous slides, throwing jokes at each other and interacting with the audience. Seb:

• Webforms has a tendency to hide HTML and actually generates a lot of goo.
• MVC relies on you knowing HTML but once you learn it, things get pretty easy.
• Webform's page lifecycle is complex
• Webforms is for morons.

Phil:

• MVC is too complicated,
• Webforms has a lot of ready-made controls, lots of 3rd party vendors
• Uses a familiar event model
• MVC is for hippies.

To sum it up, Webforms is for building apps quickly (better suited for the financial world), MVC is good if you need a high level of quality and testability.