My Session at mvcConf 2–The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines

• Posted by Shay Friedman on March 5, 2011
• 9 comments

About a month ago I gave a session at the virtual mvcConf 2 event. My session was “The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines” where I talked about the differences between ASPX, NHaml, Spark and the Razor view engines.

The session was recorded and it is available on channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/mvcConf/mvcConf-2-Shay-Friedman-The-Big-Comparison-of-ASPNET-MVC-View-Engines (at the time of this writing, it has more than 7,500 views! amazing!)

During the session I held a few polls about the preferences of the audience… the results were kinda interesting. These are screenshots of the results of the individual votes:

And summing all of them together, Razor got 70% of the votes, ASPX got 13%, Spark 12% and NHaml ended up with 6%:

So in conclusion, my prediction is that razor gonna conquer this asp.net mvc view engine market… However, the others will stay relevant and I recommend you to check them out. If they make you happier and more productive then go with them! do NOT hesitate.

Anyway, during the session I promised to post a detailed list of resources about the different view engines – so here it is:

• Web Forms View Engine (ASPX)
  • Official site - http://asp.net/mvc
  • Source code - http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/58781 
  • Download - http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3
• NHaml
  • Official site + documentation - http://code.google.com/p/nhaml/
  • Download - http://code.google.com/p/nhaml/downloads/list
• Spark
  • Official site + documentation - http://sparkviewengine.com/
  • Download - http://sparkviewengine.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx 
  • From NuGet – Install-Package Spark
• Razor
  • Official site – http://asp.net/mvc
  • Source code - http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/58781
  • Download - http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3
  • Scott Gu blog posts about razor - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/search.aspx?q=razor&o=Relevance

Thanks to all the people who made mvcConf happen! and thanks to all attendees!

All the best,
Shay.