I there a reason you're going with DevExpress? I've had bad experiences with their products.

That said, only go with Mere Mortals if it supports MVC directly. Otherwise, it seems too framework heavy for what today's web sites are.

MVC is the way to go. It seems that .NET Core 1.0 is not ready for primetime, so stick with MVC 5.

Entity Framework is what Microsoft is pushing. it makes it easy to access data, but speed is a bit slower than going with ADO.NET. If you're learning MVC, stick with EF because that's how all the samples are done. You can swap out the data layer later

Yes, go with the new version, but stay away from .NET Core. Depending on your company size, you may be able to get away with the Community Edition. (Check licensing requirements)


>Hi,
>
>I am going to start developing a simple ASP.NET application using the existing tools that I have. These are:
>
>Mere Mortals.net
>DevExpress ASP.NET
>Visual Studio 2010 Professional
>
>I don't want to purchase anything else as this project won't really cover any new expenses.
>
>The system is a front end for a 4 or 5 table database with no real data processing, just CRUD operations and a couple reports, exports and creation of Word Documents (Is openXML still the way to go for that?)
>
>So, some advice is welcome.
>
>Should I bother with Mere Mortals or not? Anything else out here that is freely available which replaces its functionality? I haven't done anything using it in years so I'll have to re-learn it anyhow. Will the DevExpress stuff work easily with MM.NET?
>
>Should I go with MVC, MVVM? Something else?
>
>Is Entity Framework still the best thing to use?
>
>Should I go with the free newer version of Visual Studio? I think I used VS Web Express 2013 a couple years back.
>
>So many questions :)