Understand MVC Pattern?

What is MVC? i don't understand why we're switching to MVC?

• so the company i work for has over 100 websites, and they're all pieces of crap. i joined this company about 4 months ago and the code we use is horrible, the way things are laid out is horrible, and i have no control over anything because the top "senior developers" are so over-protective about their code and everything goes their way. so we're stuck with using crappy classes and objects and stuff. so now they realize everything sucks, (we currently use ASP.NET, C#) so they decided to fix everything with MVC (Model-View-Controller)??? I tried reading about this, and i don't understand why this is different from any other projects i've worked on... it seems like stuff i've been doing all along. maybe i'm just understanding what MVC is or how it's supposed to be better? can someone please explain? thanks

• Answer:

  MVC is just a different software design/architecture that you can use. It first came out when OO because interesting in the '80s and was adopted in various forms. That is why it looks familiar to you - you probably make use of some of the concepts. Certainly made more sense back then when there was no standardizations in GUI and everyone had to develop their own (hence the View portion). It is not a bad architecture in this day and age but, like any other software practice, potential benefit has a lot to do with those that use it. It does not guarantee a good design or usable software. It is "better" ( and I use that loosely) because of separation of major system components. Data is designed independent of how it is displayed and how overall control is managed. View is developed to use the data but not care how the data is managed. Like any of these there are good and bad and attempting to use the method as an absolute can be a mistake. There are some advantage to data design to be made with an understanding of how the system will be managed and it interacts with the user. Doing them completely independently can cause a lot of work as one part of the triangle has to do a lot of work to consume the other.