ASP.NET - Web Forms, MVC, Core?

Web Forms or MVC?

When ASP.NET was originally released, there was only one way of doing things. Later on, Microsoft was inspired by frameworks like Ruby on Rails and added the ability to use an MVC (Model-View-Controller) approach for your ASP.NET websites. With that move, ASP.NET was basically divided into ASP.NET Web Forms (the original approach) and ASP.NET MVC. They share a lot of functionality, thanks to the .NET framework, but there are many differences in how to accomplish even the most basic tasks.

In this tutorial, we will focus on the Web Forms part of ASP.NET, but feel free to investigate the other options - ASP.NET is truly a versatile platform and can be used in several ways, depending on your needs and preferences.

ASP.NET Core or regular?

You will likely hear a lot about the Core version of the .NET framework these days and understandably so! The Core version marks a huge change in the .NET framework, where it goes from an (almost) exclusive Windows-thing to a multi-platform framework for Windows, macOS and several Linux distributions.

For you as an ASP.NET developer this is also important, since it makes it even easier to get your ASP.NET websites hosted on other platforms than Windows Server, e.g. on a Linux server. However, as already mentioned, this tutorial will focus on the Web Forms part of ASP.NET and as of writing, Microsoft has no plans to port this part of ASP.NET to the Core version. That basically means that if you want to develop ASP.NET Web Forms websites, as you will learn in this tutorial, you will have to use the regular (non-Core) version of the .NET framework and likely have your website hosted on a Windows Server. For many people, this is not a problem, but you should still be aware of this.

Summary

In this tutorial we will be developing websites using ASP.NET Web Forms with the regular .NET framework. Read on to get started!