Until late 2008, I was happy enough with Web Forms. I did recognize its weak points and could nicely work around them with discipline and systematic application of design principles. But a new thing called ASP.NET MVC was receiving enthusiastic reviews by a growing subset of the ASP.NET community. So I started to consider ASP. NET MVC and explore its architecture and potential while constantly trying to envision concrete business scenarios in which to employ it. I did this for about a year. Then I switched to ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET was devised in the late 1990s at a time when many companies in various industry sectors were rapidly discovering the Internet. For businesses, the Internet was a real breakthrough, making possible innovations in software infrastructure, marketing, distribution, and communication that were impractical or impossible before. Built on top of classic Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET was the right technology at the right time, and it marked a turning point for the Web industry as a whole. For years, being a Web developer meant gaining a skill set centered on HTML and JavaScript and that was, therefore, radically different from the skills required for mainstream programming, which at the time was mostly based on C/C++, Java, and Delphi languages. ASP.NET combined the productivity of a visual and RAD environment with a component-based programming model. The primary goal of ASP.NET was to enable developers to build applications quickly and effectively without having to deal with low-level details such as HTTP, HTML, and JavaScript intricacies. That was exactly what the community loudly demanded in the late 1990s. And ASP.NET is what Microsoft delivered to address this request, exceeding expectations by a large extent.