ASP.NET WebForms is Not Dead

Posted on Sunday, July 24, 2011

With all the current chatter surrounding technologies like ASP.NET MVC, some developers seem to be reaching the conclusion that WebForms is dead. It turns out that such reports are greatly exaggerated.

WebForms are still the most popular ASP.NET technology, and Microsoft is continuing to enhance this technology. A number of enhancements were added to WebForms in ASP.NET 4.0. In some cases, these include technologies were taken from ASP.NET MVC. For example, page routing.

In addition, Microsoft is adding a number of enhancements to WebForms in the next version of ASP.NET (vNext). These will also include additional technologies taken from ASP.NET MVC. Planned improvements include areas like enhanced data binding, async improvements, better support for HTML 5, and more.

There is an excellent video on the current and future state of WebForms posted on Channel 9's website. This is a video of Damian Edwards' presentation at Tech Ed.

This video discusses some of the WebForms features new to ASP.NET 4, as well as what's coming in the next version. If you plan on using WebForms into the future, you might want to check this out. It runs about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Yes, there are other ASP.NET technologies to choose from these days. But WebForms continues to remain a popular and valid choice.