Difference Between MVC and WebForms and Advantages of MVC Over the WebForms

Introduction

In today's article explain what the differences are between MVC and WebForms and what are the advantages of MVC over WebForms.

Model–View–Controller (MVC) was first released in 2009 and after that there was a massive shift of developers toward MVC.

MVC is a framework for developing ASP.NET applications and it's main components are Models, Views and Controllers. MVC also provides you full control over the HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Controller

Controllers are the heart of MVC. A controller handles some of the main work of the application, such as:

• It handles the User Input.
• It handles the User Interaction.
• It reads the data from the View.
• Then it sends the data read to the Model.

In simple words you can say that it receives the request from the user and sends it to the Model, then the Model retrieves the related data from the database and sends the result to the View.

View

View is simply used to display the data, it is the Graphical Data Representation. As I said previouisly, the "Model sends the output to the View then the View displays the data to the end user", so it works like a bridge between the Model and the End User.

Model

A Model handles the logic for the application data, it implements the Data Domain logic. The Database Connection is part of the model and it provides the output requested by the user.

Advantages

The advantages of MVC over WebForms are:

1. In MVC, the layers are clearly separated and that helps greatly when it comes to the maintenance of the application.
2. In MVC, Event Handler Pages are very light because the ASP Web Server Controls are not available.
3. In MVC, View State is not supported, but View Engine is supported and that increases it's performance.
4. It's Serach Engine Optimization (SEO) is also very high.
5. Like WPF the User Interface is also Lightly Coupled.
6. In MVC unit testing can be easily done and parallel development is also possible.

Overlap

Now the question is whether MVC overlaps WebForms.

The answer is simple; no. We can use any of them depending on our requirements. Both are used for developing the ASP.NET Web Application.

A few features in both of these are similar, like Security Implementation, Caching and Membership Providing.