Am I losing out by not using MVC

There are a lot of ASP.NET web forms coders out there who acknowledge that they simply don't fully grasp ASP.NET MVC. In a lot of ways, I can associate with them. The vocal fraction that speaks about ASP.NET MVC talk about it with such enthusiasm that they make it sound like you'd have to be a idiot not to move over. In certainty, the selection isn't nearly as straightforward.

ASP.NET web forms aren't going anyplace. These techniques have their proper place in a web developer's toolbox and it's important to discover their strengths and weaknesses. In general, the ASP.NET MVC framework has a tendency to sacrifice ease-of-use (e.g. viewstate, validation, etc.) in order to present developers more restrictive control over the reins. This can be a terrific thing, but only if you take advantage of it. Or else it can just as readily be a issue.

With all of this, I have produced a speedy metric to find out if ASP.NET MVC is appropriate for you. The way I see it, there are a few primary factors a developer should select the ASP.NET MVC framework over ASP.NET web forms. If none of these factors are convincing to you, then you should stick with ASP.NET web forms:

To Increase Control and Extensibility

As pointed out in the commentary, ASP.NET MVC gives you more control and extensibility options tha
ASP.NET web forms. You get total management over the site request lifecycle and the means to replace out several key pieces of the framework (e.g. view engine, routing, etc.), none of which is possible with ASP.NET web forms.

In addition to this, you also acquire complete control over the rendered HTML. In general, the rendered HTML from ASP.NET web forms apps is atrocious. The web controls it employs build nonsense ids and invisible fields galore that not only impede the performance of a site, but also make CSS styling and Javascript development a pain. ASP.NET MVC makes you to be much more in tune with your HTML. There aren't any datagrids or repeaters that amazingly generate markup for you. There aren't any concealed fields to persist state for you. It's just you, the HTML, and a few extension methods.

To Unit Test

This, in my opinion, is the most engaging factor to use ASP.NET MVC. When it comes to unit testing, ASP.NET MVC simply beats ASP.NET web forms. It's not even close. Whereas ASP.NET web forms needs you to hop through all forms of hoops to test around the web page event lifecycle, the ASP.NET MVC framework pretty much begs to be tested. There are interfaces all over proclaiming "mock me up!".

There's a good reason why the greatest ASP.NET MVC fans also are inclined to be TDD promoters; it's due to the fact ASP.NET MVC in fact permits for TDD. Professionally, I think this is where all the fervour comes from. Simply put: it's truly hard to do TDD with ASP.NET web forms and truly painless to do it in ASP.NET MVC.

To Try out Something Different

I should mention that learning ASP.NET MVC is an extremely engaging process since the ASP.NET MVC framework team has been so interactive in the process. I consider a huge part of the attractiveness of ASP.NET MVC is that the community's feedback is not only being taken into consideration, it is definitely being sought after. The framework has sparked so many talks and discussions over best practices that simply following along presents you to concepts you might recently have been ignorant of. I would really recommend understanding the ASP.NET MVC framework for this purpose alone.

So there it is. Aside from those three, I can't think of any other reasons why a developer would learn ASP.NET MVC. Possibly this is why the adoption rate isn't nearly as high as we think it should be. The incentive for using the framework essentially boils down to unit testing, control/extensibility, and boredom/interest. Fine reasons, but not really game breakers for the great greater part of web developers out there.