ASP.NET MVC 4.5 Benefits

We need speed. Speed’s what we need. Greasy, fast speed! And we don’t need to go chasing chickens to get it either. In this post, I highlight some of my personal opinions on the benefits of ASP.NET MVC.

Speed

ASP.NET MVC brings faster performance on the client side as well as in the development process. The removal of the ViewState variable, which stored countless bits of page state info, reducing the page size transferred. This means less bandwidth, which means less data, and which ultimately means it’s faster and cheaper.

SEO Friendly URLs & ASP.NET MVC

Next up is another nice addition,  SEO friendly urls! In the Microsoft world, SEO used to prove difficult (or you had to go through some additional steps to search engine optimize your work). In the past, we had to either build a handler or use a pre-built library in web forms to remove the .aspx extension from the page and rewrite the URL. Luckily, MVC brings SEO to the table right out of the box.

Models, Views, Controllers (MVC) – Simpler Front-End Work

(M)odels, (V)iews, (C)ontrollers Oh My! The URL structure is now tightly integrated with the code structure, which promotes cleaner code. Along with the MVC pattern, you get a clean SoC (Separation of Concerns) where all the business logic is handled outside of the View, so the HTML developer’s job is much easier and the code is cleaner. The Controller houses the logic for which Views are rendered and passes a model to that View for rendering. The rendered HTML is now all in the Views as opposed to server controls, so although you could override the “Render” method of server controls, you don’t end up with HTML inside of your server code, which would make changing the layout more difficult and extremely tedious.

MVC = Unobtrusive Ajax

Unobtrusive Ajax support is just amazing. It’s unbelievably simple to make Ajax posts and update the page with partial views, making the end user experience lightning fast and seamless. The good thing about Ajax is you can’t really overdo it either. The more the merrier, and now it’s just that much simpler to do.

Most major browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections the browser is allowed to establish at one time. Which means the more files the browser has to download, the slower the page is going to load. MVC bundling takes care of this by grouping specific files that will always work together, and it combines them into 1 file, minifies them, and sends them on their way to the end user’s browser, freeing up other connections to download other content at the same time.

The current version is ASP.NET MVC 4.5, which is very mature and robust with many features. At Atilus, we specialize in developing business software and web applications. Web applications require validation of forms and user input. The new data annotations make cake work of this by letting you tag the model properties with [Required] or [Email] attributes for validation. You can expand the data annotations as well with your own by inheriting from the ValidationAttribute.

When it comes to development, hands down, MVC is the way to go.