Should I use Web Forms or the Razor view engine in this scenario

Question

Hypothetical scenario:

I want to create a web app that will rely heavily on the display of tabular data. The GUI should allow for resizing or columns, grouping by columns using drag and drop and on the fly filtering.

If I went with Web Forms, I know I could buy Telerik and other 3rd party controls to give me this functionality with relative ease. If I went with Razor, I think I would be up the creek trying to strengthen my underdeveloped client side coding skills and would end up with an inferior interface in the end.

I've read about some of the advantages of Razor and its cleanness is compelling, but are there no grid components that would give me rich features like those described above with low development cost, ie, do I have to write them myself?

I read many of the postings here about Razor and didn't quite see this question addressed, I hope its not really a duplicate.

Answer 1

Don't underestimate the learning curve of ASP.NET MVC 3. It's not as easy as the tutorials would have you believe, and it's very easy to get yourself into a mess with Razor, if you're not careful.

If you're comfortable with WebForms and know you can solve the task with relative ease using that technology, I would recommend staying with it for now.

There are lots of compelling reasons to use MVC, but you don't seem to mention any of them, other than "that's what the cool kids are doing". And that shouldn't be the primary reason. :)

Answer 2

in fact Telerik, DevXpress, Infragistics, they all have grids for MVC with native filtering, grouping, sorting and I guess also column resize out of the box:

check here the DevXpress MVC extensions's GridView