Quick post for the day. I was trying to configure a data source in a listview – converting over to EntityFramework from a SQL data source – and I got this funky message:

Hmmm. Why is this? Well, I had to open up my data models project, and change the ProviderManifestToken=”2012″ attribute to “=2008”.

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And voila. Changing that one key – and this is a known bug with EntityFramework 6 that the team has on their list to fix – got me where I needed to go. I had my lot tracking admin screen up and going in about 5 minutes.

Webforms Versus MVC – Honestly, Who Cares?

P.s. – Webforms, rightly, have a bad name – because of bloated codebehind. But what happens when you drag on a listview, and click on the little arrow in the Design pane – and point to an EF data source with a PK? Suddenly, you have a fully functioning page – with NO codebehind – and all your upd/ins/del statements are coming straight from EF. That seems pretty clean to me.

To me – and to many others – ASP.NET Webforms and MVC are equivalent forms. IF your webform has no bloated codebehind, and is running from either a EF-generated model or, better, knockoutJS data binding – don’t you have a clean and easy to maintain architecture?

Webforms are bad if you have bloated codebehind. They’re good and equivalent to MVC without that code smell. MVVM – well, that is a superior pattern to both – but that’s for a future post.