Jim Zimmerman

I am currently moving a project from a typical webforms project to the new asp.net mvc framework project.  I am already seeing some huge benefits that I wanted to share with others.  Of course there is no viewstate in asp.net mvc and this has its advantages.  The most significant change is the size of my home page.  the amount of text in the page is down over 40%.  so my home page was 32K and now it is only 18K.  I am noticing even quicker page response times also running locally and on the server.  The page just seems to render faster, especially when hitting the back button.  Also it just feels cleaner without all those controls and I can have 100% control of the html that spits out.  It reminds me of back in the classic asp and PHP days, but without all the pain.  I did not realize how much I missed just writing straight html without controls.  

At first I thought that it would slow me down and that I would have to write more code,  but I think the opposite is true.   I don't have to deal with code behind any more and I can test so much easier now the action that every form calls.  I was able to convert an existing website that had Ajax control toolkit, membership services and several contact forms in about a week.  Not even that if you counted the hours.  Not too bad.  These tutorials really helped me out: http://www.asp.net/LEARN/3.5-extensions-videos/#mvc

We are about ready to go into production with these bits as we see that it is very stable and since we have the source code to the entire framework in our source tree, it feels safe since we can always fix a bug in the framework if we need to.  You can get the source code here: ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 Source Code