Drawbacks of WebFormsMVP?

While ASP.NET MVC seems to be a viable technology praised by a lot of developers, I can't seem to find enough reasons to devote my energy and time for it. The main reason is that I don't find enough .NET jobs asking for it. Companies still use WebForms and it works just fine for them. I am n开发者_开发技巧ot self employed where I get to choose the technology I like. I would rather use my time improve my skills in SilverLight, JQuery, Javascript, SQL, LINQ.. etc. Even Photoshop!

So I got interested in webformsmvp.com. I get to still use WebForms and use better testing methods. Anyone who has experience with it can tell me what they didn't like about it?

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I think you'll find that learning MVC will ultimately prove useful, as it really is a lot easier/cleaner than web forms, and more people will probably move in this direction eventually...

Third party frameworks, while useful, will probably never be as pervasive in the job market as some MS backed framework.

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"I can't seem to find enough reasons to devote my energy and time for it. The main reason is that I don't find enough .NET jobs asking for it."

Exactly what I found out in the last round of job interviews. I can get away with using Spring.NET and NHibernate, but ASP .NET MVC is still a tough nut to crack no matter where I go. With that said, there is still a fair bit of intranet & WWW sites out there built upon the underlying ASP .NET base. I have found it much more easier to migrate to WebForms MVP instead. I do like ASP .NET MVC, but I'm having fun with WebForms MVP. Damian Edwards and Tatham Oddie designed this framework to promote standards, best practices, and testability if you are stuck doing web forms. No matter what folks say, the underlying ASP .NET event driven, component model is not going away any time soon or if ever.

Now that Damian Edwards is now working for Microsoft on the ASP .NET team, I feel safer about the future of web forms in general. I'm going to stick with this framework for a bit. :)

To answer the original question: all headaches I've ran into (so far) have been fixed in subsequent days and made available on the project's CodePlex repository (http://webformsmvp.codeplex.com/). God, I love open source.

In regards to ASP .NET MVC: still, I would fight your disinterest and learn it.

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I've never used WebFormsMVP so I will make general statements to using 3rd party frameworks.

Like any 3rd party framework there are always drawbacks. For example I work as a consultant to a government agency and their Technical Standards department disallows any Open Source framework.

Depending on the maturity of WebFormsMVP you could spend a large amount of time having to re-write sections of your code when the underlying framework is upgraded or when new versions come out.

Support is another major reason why the framework might/might not be suitable. If the framework is from a major provider (Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc) you will generally find an active community that can assist when you encounter an issue.

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Choosing between WebForms and MCV is control over productivity. MVP for WebForms can be a nice way to go, because you can keep the productivity while adding testability. However, you need to do good research whether the webformsmvp.com library is right for you. Try to find out how well is it supported, how big is its user communicate and such. Abandoned open source projects can be a major pain, if you’ve used in a commercial product.

There are other MVP frameworks for ASP.NET, one of which comes from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group. While the products from P&P are typically a bit more complex (because they're focused on Enterprise Development) you might take a look at the Composite Web Client Library.