Keyvan Nayyeri

Based on experience, I have realized that one of the most confusing points for newbie ASP.NET MVC developers even those who are completely new to ASP.NET world is the ambiguity of relationship between ASP.NET, ASP.NET WebForms, and ASP.NET MVC. In my opinion this is a vital part in the learning process of ASP.NET and its derivations such as ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

Therefore, I want to write this post in order to clarify this point more and more. I know that there have been some other posts covering this topic even better than mine but this is worth repetition to spread the word. Besides, I’m going to publish another post about the learning process of ASP.NET MVC and this background information can help complementing it as well.

First of all, let me give a short historical background which can clarify the next coming paragraphs. I may publish a new posts series of sweet historical background on this topic in the future, but for now this is all I need here.

The original ASP.NET product was a part of the .NET Framework 1.0 released in 2002, and became richer in versions 1.1 and 2.0. In this while, Microsoft understood some facts about the product such as the weaknesses of this product and the new market requirements. In the newer versions they tried to resolve some minor problems with the ASP.NET, and adapt with new techniques and methods to some extent. However, some of the weaknesses were more fundamental than something that could be resolved in the same product with that infrastructure and there were also a huge wave of MVC pattern talks mainly posed by Ruby on Rails success.

Putting these things together, Microsoft came to the point to revisit its ASP.NET product stack in order to answer to all these things. Their answer was re-architecting the whole product in order to open new doors to future derivations of ASP.NET as new technologies. They started working on two products in this line including ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

At this point the new architecture of ASP.NET product includes some main portions including core ASP.NET API, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data that all share some commonalities. So you can understand that the original ASP.NET term no more refers to the same technology. Now you have to call that technology ASP.NET WebForms, and refer to the ASP.NET as the parent product included within the .NET Framework.

The following figure shows the schematic view of the new ASP.NET architecture. I got the figure from a PDC08 session.

This figure clarifies the distinction of these technologies and shows how they relate together. As you see, they’re sharing some parts in order to work and most of these shared portions are in the core infrastructure.

ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data as three web development technologies need to enable some features that are available in all similar technologies such as caching, authentication, and authorization. Since these features should be distributed in all the technologies, they are encapsulated in the core API. Each of the technologies applies such features in its core and adds its own implementation and features to offer a new technology appropriate for a business scenario.

As the last note, I hope that we all try to consider this new architecture and the abovementioned distinction in all our texts, articles, tutorials, and other materials. These days the term ASP.NET is very general, and covers a wider range of technologies, so it should not be used interchangeably with ASP.NET WebForms and/or ASP.NET MVC.