When microsoft released ASP.Net, it was thought that it would relieve the need to master HTML and related technologies for most use cases. It will bring the web development closer to windows forms development model with both having similar controls and tools. In ASP.Net forms, we would be able to drag a data grid, drop it on to a page and bind it to a data source, the same way we used to do for windows apps.
Initially I was excited about the idea. Coming from a windows development background, it made things simpler for me. As I did more work with ASP.Net, something didn’t look right. It was very easy to do things you do most of the time in the most common way. But if you want to do something little bit different, then the complexity of the platform made it ridiculously difficult. ASP.Net forms had some significant improvements over ASP but, in hindsight, I think the power and simplicity of HTML, CSS and JavaScript was underestimated.
With ASP.Net MVC, the focus is back on the key web technologies and it feels so much better.
For a detailed comparison between the two technologies, see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd942833.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2008/07/09/asp-net-mvc-vs-asp-net-web-form.aspx
For learning ASP.Net MVC, I would recommend the Pluralsight video tutorial at ASP.Net MVC website.
