Brief the Pros and Cons of ASP.NET MVC Razor View Engine? | ASP.NET MVC Interview Question

Pros:
  • Compact, Expressive, and Fluid
  • Easy to Learn
  • Is not a new language
  • Has great Intellisense
  • Unit Testable
  • Ubiquitous, ships with ASP.NET MVC
Cons:
  • Creates a slightly different problem from "tag soup" referenced above. Where the server tags actually provide structure around server and non-server code, Razor confuses HTML and server code, making pure HTML or JS development challenging (see Con Example #1) as you end up having to "escape" HTML and / or JavaScript tags under certain very common conditions.
  • Poor encapsulation+reuseability: It's impractical to call a razor template as if it were a normal method - in practice razor can call code but not vice versa, which can encourage mixing of code and presentation.
  • Syntax is very html-oriented; generating non-html content can be tricky. Despite this, razor's data model is essentially just string-concatenation, so syntax and nesting errors are neither statically nor dynamically detected, though VS.NET design-time help mitigates this somewhat. Maintainability and refactorability can suffer due to this.
Sample Razor Snippet:
@{
    <h3>Team Members</h3> string[] teamMembers = {"Matt", "Joanne", "Robert"};
    foreach (var person in teamMembers)
    {
        <p>@person</p>
    }
}