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Man, it has been a long time since I looked at ASP.NET Web Forms. I will say I personally prefer ASP.NET MVC, but jobs are few and far between for MVC. So I am wanting to get back into Web Forms to be prepared to use it on the job. However, I have not touched it since .NET 2.0 and VS 2005. In the .NET world, that was several lifetimes ago.

How different are the later version of Web Forms? I know of a few updates, such as some made in 2008 that made client-side coding easier. But I am sure that is only a piece of the iceberg. Anyone used SignalR with Web Forms?

Nope sorry I didn't had time to experiment much and I didn't tried SignalR so far. However I have a project which could benefit from it at work and I shall try next year to check it out

How much have Web Forms changed since the 2.0 days?

I've used SignalR with MVC 4.5 I thought they wern't going to continue webforms. It's not all that bad with Visual Studio. Just hit F12 when you aren't sure what something is.

WebForms will hardly go anywhere soon. Too many people use it. And honestly .NET MVC is still far from giving all the features WebForms offers.

I use web forms daily. If you are using MVC then I see no issue getting caught up quick as Web Forms have not changed a ton and are pretty simple overall. I am on the opposite side of the track. I use web forms and have not used MVC and see a ton of jobs hiring for MVC so i want to learn.

hallsofvallhalla wrote:I use web forms daily. If you are using MVC then I see no issue getting caught up quick as Web Forms have not changed a ton and are pretty simple overall. I am on the opposite side of the track. I use web forms and have not used MVC and see a ton of jobs hiring for MVC so i want to learn.

You will find MVC likely easier for you to learn than Web Forms originally were due to your experience with PHP and other MVC frameworks. Web Forms is pretty unique in the world of web development, so everyone is essentially starting from nothing to learn it (I guess Windows Forms experience could help), but MVC is familiar to web devs.

And I agree that Web Forms aren't going anywhere. There are far too many applications written with it in the wild. But then again, Microsoft doesn't have the best track record for things like that (see Visual Basic 6).

Hehe and VB6 is still used today. I even see jobs occasionally.

hallsofvallhalla wrote:Hehe and VB6 is still used today. I even see jobs occasionally.

Like I said in another thread, extremely popular languages never go away

Microsoft killed COM VB at the height of its popularity (when it was literally used by millions of devs worldwide, and some sources said it was the most popular language in the world, unseating C++) to introduce a new product. I am not saying it was a mistake, mind you. .NET is so much better than COM VB. However, the end of new tools and eventually the end of official support (which meant no more runtimes for new versions of Windows) was a pretty rough blow to a lot of developers and companies who had invested in it. Dozens of petitions to have Microsoft split VB between a VB Classic line and VB.NET and continue to support both received thousands of signatures and had a ton of support, but fell on deaf ears. VB support quietly expired a few years back.

So, while it seems Web Forms are too big to ever be removed, Microsoft has woken up on the crazy side of the bed before