What is View Engine in ASP.NET MVC and How It is used?

• In Asp.net MVC, View engine holds the responsibility of rendering the view to the browser. MVC supports Razor Engine and Web Form by default
• There are a lot of Third Party View engines available for use, We can go for them as well. Eg: Nhaml, Park, NDjango, SharpDOM etc.,

Lets see the difference between Razor and Web Form View engines.

Razor View Engine vs Web Form View Engine:

Release :

• Razor Engine was introduced in MVC3
• Web Form view engine is available since the MVC was introduced with its default View engine

File Extension :

• Razor Engine has file extensions: 
  • .cshtml for C#
  • .cbhtml for VB, Partial Views, Editor Template and Layout Page.

• Web Form Engine is set as default View engine in Visual Studio. It has file extensions:
  • .aspx for views
  • .ascx for partial view
  • .master for layouts

Base Class :

• Namespace for Razor view engine is System.Web.Razor.
• Namespace for Web Form view engine is System.Web.WebFormViewEngine.

Syntax :

• In Razor View, we use the @ symbol succeeded by tag. It is not mandatory to explicitly close the code-block
  Eg : @Html.ActionLink(“Click”,”dotnet-Helpers.com”)
• In Web Form view engine, we use <%: … %>
  Eg : <% :Html.ActionLink(“Click”,”dotnetHelpers”)%>

Comments :

• Razor uses @* …. *@ for comments.
• Web Form uses <!–…–> for comments.

Test Driven Development :

• The Razor Engine supports TDD.
• Web Form view engine does not support TDD because it depends on the System.Web.UI.Page class

Design Mode :

• In Razor Engine, it does not support design mode in visual studio.(ie., Preview mode).
• In Web Form Engine, it support design mode.