MVC Architecture

MVC or Model View Controller is an architectural style that separates the business from the presentation layer to enable independent development and testing of each. MVC is not a new concept, It has existed right from the nascent days of software development with the first implementation being in SmallTalk in 1979 done by Trygve Reenskaug.

It is relatively new to the Microsoft World though, with the ASP.NET MVC framework being shipped in 2008 compatible with Visual Studio 2008 – .NET Framework 3.5. So what is MVC? MVC divides the application into three parts – The model, View and the controller.

• Controller:- The controller is the heart of the MVC application. It recieves each and every request that is made by the user and responds to it accordingly. It controls the flow of the application.

• Views:- This is the actual UI of the application. The controller controls how the view should be rendered to the browser. Views contain markup, scripts just like an .aspx page

• Model:- Apart from the View and the controller, all the other parts in the application are collective called as the Model. These components are the business and data logic of the application.

A huge advantage of the MVC architecture is that it separates all these three components and makes them completely independent of each other. Hence all of them can be tested separately rather than the case with the webform architecture where testing each component is a pain and mostly we end up doing functional testing for the whole application. This also means modifying one component is far more easy without disturbing the whole application.

Since all the requests are now handled by the controller, we cannot use the postback feature of the web controls like the webform architecture. One of the drawback (or advantage) of MVC is the level of control over HTML rendering that we have. Since we can exactly control how the page will be rendered, we have to write more code to do so. Also you will see more code mixed with Markup, something that ASP.NET eliminated with the help of code behind.

MVC and WebForms are to be seen as two distinct styles which are advantageous to use depending on the scenario, rather than being pitted against each other. If you have a small standalone application to develop with fewer programming resources, a webform based application makes more sense since there is less coding involved. However if you are looking to build an application that would be used and extended by a large number of users, MVC is certainly the way to go.

Reference:http://blog.ganeshzone.net/blog/index.php/tag/mvc/