What is the difference between a View and a PartialView in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

What is the difference between a View and a PartialView in ASP.NET MVC?

At first glance the need for both seems non-obvious to me.

Answer 1

Look at StackOverflow.com site: Main site (View) contains components like:

• Tags
• Related
• Ad

So Tags, related, Ad etc. can be composed as PartialViews. The advantage of this is that PartialViews can be simply cached by OutputCache instead of recreating all site: performance gain.