Warning: highly subjective content ahead.

In the recent weeks we’ve seen several control vendors come up with toolkits that target ASP.NET MVC. Personally, I don’t see anything that might make me starting to consider picking one of these toolkits to speed up development. Why on earth would I prefer a wrapper around jQuery UI or shoehorning existing WebForms controls in MVC views?

The beauty of ASP.NET MVC is that it embraces the web as it is and this automatically involves HTML, CSS and Javascript. Don’t be afraid for that. The combination can be so powerful! Why aren’t there any large component vendors for PHP, Rails, Django etc? Isn’t it probably possible that these components are not required to do proper web development?

The control vendors seem to be targeting people who come from a Windows background that don’t want to learn HTML and Javascript, but from my experiences I can say that those people should really stick to WebForms.

Considering ASP.NET MVC UI controls? Learn HTML and Javascript!
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5 thoughts on “Considering ASP.NET MVC UI controls? Learn HTML and Javascript!

  • August 13, 2009 at 12:29 pm
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    Agree

  • August 13, 2009 at 2:26 pm
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    Couldn’t agree more! I was initially exited when I heard there was some jQuery *helpers* from Telerik, but they are really just an unnecessary abstraction so devs don’t need to learn JS. I can’t see any other real benefit from using them.

  • August 14, 2009 at 6:18 am
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    Cannot agree more!
    In fact all the 3rd party controls bring additional complexity, dependency, maintenance, deployment problems just to state some.

  • August 23, 2009 at 4:49 pm
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    I agree with you about the toolkits you linked to, but I think Coolite (http://www.coolite.com/) might be on to something. Their toolkit (actually just a wrapper on to ExtJS) forgoes the WebForms postback model, and in the process opens itself up to usage in both WebForms and MVC scenarios.

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