I would like to know what, why or when it is better to choose cshtml and what, why or when it is better to choose aspx technologies? What are these two technologies intended for?
Thank you,
This question is related to
asp.net
asp.net-mvc
razor
Cshtml files are the ones used by Razor and as stated as answer for this question, their main advantage is that they can be rendered inside unit tests. The various answers to this other topic will bring a lot of other interesting points.
Razor is a view engine for ASP.NET MVC, and also a template engine. Razor code and ASP.NET inline code (code mixed with markup) both get compiled first and get turned into a temporary assembly before being executed. Thus, just like C# and VB.NET both compile to IL which makes them interchangable, Razor and Inline code are both interchangable.
Therefore, it's more a matter of style and interest. I'm more comfortable with razor, rather than ASP.NET inline code, that is, I prefer Razor (cshtml) pages to .aspx pages.
Imagine that you want to get a Human
class, and render it. In cshtml files you write:
<div>Name is @Model.Name</div>
While in aspx files you write:
<div>Name is <%= Human.Name %></div>
As you can see, @
sign of razor makes mixing code and markup much easier.
While the syntax is certainly different between Razor (.cshtml
/.vbhtml
) and WebForms (.aspx
/.ascx
), (Razor's being the more concise and modern of the two), nobody has mentioned that while both can be used as View Engines / Templating Engines, traditional ASP.NET Web Forms controls can be used on any .aspx or .ascx files, (even in cohesion with an MVC architecture).
This is relevant in situations where long standing solutions to a problem have been established and packaged into a pluggable component (e.g. a large-file uploading control) and you want to use it in an MVC site. With Razor, you can't do this. However, you can execute all of the same backend-processing that you would use with a traditional ASP.NET architecture with a Web Form view.
Furthermore, ASP.NET web forms views can have Code-Behind files, which allows embedding logic into a separate file that is compiled together with the view. While the software development community is growing to be see tightly coupled architectures and the Smart Client pattern as bad practice, it used to be the main way of doing things and is still very much possible with .aspx/.ascx files. Razor, intentionally, has no such quality.
Source: Stackoverflow.com