6 Reasons to Use Angular Instead of ASP.NET MVC (Razor)

At Imaginet, we recommend the use of single-page applications using Angular for building enterprise applications. Customer solutions are still being built using ASP.NET MVC with Razor pages, generally because it is a well-known technology stack that is familiar to most companies’ development teams.

However, this article will present six reasons why Angular is the superior option for building your application. Angular applications still follow an MVC style (or perhaps more correctly MVVM). In fact, they do so more explicitly than ASP.NET MVC applications do.

1. Does not mix client and server code within the same file.

Angular does away with the problem of mixing client and server code within the same file. Razor syntax allows the developer to embed client and server code within the same file and to use server-side logic to control the client-side presentation. Angular decouples the client-side processing completely from the server.

2. Clear separation between client and server.

Building off this point, a second, added benefit of not mixing client and server code is a clear separation of concerns between the client and server. The Angular client is exclusively concerned with presentation, that is, rendering, validation, data formatting, navigation etc. The server-side is completely dedicated to server-side processes such as, authentication, business logic and data processing.

3. Better automated testing.

Angular applications support better automated testing for both the client and server. Again, because they are clearly separated, tests of client or server do not need to account for each other in any way. The Angular CLI comes with pre-packaged tools to make testing your applications’ user interfaces easier than ever before.

4. Easier UX/UI design transition.

UX/UI design with an Angular application in mind is easier to translate from design to implementation. Since the UI will not be impacted by server-side logic, the designer is free to design knowing that the layout will be managed by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript only. By contrast, a designer working with cshtml is frequently impacted by the potential changes imposed by server-side code.

5. Growing libraries and extensions.

Single-page applications, and Angular in particular, are constantly being updated with more and more presentation libraries and extensions compared to ASP.NET MVC. Angular provides robust extensibility and customization and has deep community support that is continually growing.

6. Team support.

Finally, Angular applications allow your team to support specific areas of expertise. Although Imaginet’s solution consultants are experts in full stack development and do not specialize between front-end and back-end coding, many educational institutions provide practical training in specific areas, front-end development being predominant among those. Angular makes it possible to have your team’s core developers who are well-versed in server-side technologies support that part of your application, while you can find many newer front-end developers who are educated and trained extensively in the latest and greatest of Angular and it’s counterparts.