The performance gains I saw weren't from the database perspective. Web forms has a lot of overhead in maintaining the view state. I had pages where the view state caused total page size to go into the Megabytes range. MVC doesn't track any kind of view state so that overhead doesn't exist. That doesn't mean MVC can't track form state or page state, it's just done differently.

It can be largely client side, if you want it to be. But really it's mostly server side, IMHO. You manipulate your data and make all your decisions in the controller, then send that to the view, which renders it for the client. When the user clicks, it calls another action in your controller and you do everything there. MVC works really well even without using any javascript or jquery.

Sure, controls are gone, but now there are HtmlHelpers. There are some good ones built in, you can write your own, and there are some good libraries out there, like HtmlTags

I made the push for my team to switch from web forms to MVC earlier this year. None of us had any experience with MVC, and had been using web forms for years. The entire team now hopes they never have to work on another web forms application again! Our development time is much shorter with MVC, and the apps are unbelievably faster.

Aaron Throckmorton

I have recently started using Git for my source control needs. It's fast and doesn't require running a dedicated server. When working with multiple locations/laptops, you can setup a central repository on a shared network drive that you can publish your changes to, and then pull from there on the other computer. It keeps everything in sync. It doesn't integrate with VS Express, but the command line and GUI work fantastically well. Git has a lot of powerful features that I don't use (yet). But it does the job for simple projects as well. It's worth the steep learning curve.