I Like Jeffrey Palermo’s Prediction…

I’ve been playing around with ASP.NET MVC for about a week now and it does everything right that ASP.NET web forms did so wrong.  I’ve hated ASP.NET web forms with a passion as soon as I realized that the model was terrible for the majority of development shops in terms of managing unmanageable code jumbles — huge methods written on event handlers…

Don’t get me wrong, ASP.NET 1.0 was a huge step up from classic ASP, but it has exploded into this huge culture of control based RAD developers.  Not that you couldn’t roll your own MVC pattern for ASP.NET, but having it as an officially supported development model should help bring more web developers out from the grips of the dark side.

Most consultants (even “senior” ones) simply take the quick-and-dirty route when it comes to ASP.NET web forms development, dragging and dropping controls all day long.  Not that it’s a bad thing…for prototyping, but it quickly devolves into hard to manage, hard to maintain, and difficult to test codebases with very low levels of reusability.  This is especially true once you roll on junior or mid level developers to a web project.

Earlier in the year, Jeffrey Palermo predicted that MVC would replace web forms as the dominant web application development model on the .NET platform.  With the recent news of MVC 2, Palermo reasserts his prediction with even greater conviction.  I was already long convinced that ASP.NET web forms was a craptastic model for web application development, but I had some skepticism about MVC (after my pretty awesome experience with Django).  This past week has convinced me that MVC kicks ass and I hope that Jeffrey’s prediction is right.

I wholeheartedly agree; I simply can’t wait to dump ASP.NET web forms.