Maybe need to move back to ASP.NET to get his site up again ;-)
I was going to disagree with the entirety of his post but seems there is no need.
Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#22One of the first tasks the new CEO will have when Ballmer leaves is the job of convincing Enterprise customers that Microsoft is still here to fill their needs. That said, the conclusions the author came to may very well be true for classic "Web Forms" projects, and though he noted MVC... i don't feel like he gave it the proper time it deserves. In fact, I find almost the opposite of his sentiments to be true. MVC is…
One of the first tasks the new CEO will have when Ballmer leaves is the job of convincing Enterprise customers that Microsoft is still here to fill their needs I don't think that Enterprise customers are the problem- they already use MS all the time. It's the small to medium size companies that aren't using it - and as they become larger companies it will become a problem for MS.
> they already use MS all the time
Exactly, we've been the bread and butter for Microsoft for a long time. Yet with Windows 8, we're starting to feel like that's just not true... at least that's the sentiment when I talk to some of my colleagues. For instance We built our main product using WPF, today WPF is all but discontinued. XAML is bigger then ever, but only if you want to make a windows store app.
If I leave .NET it's not going to be because some hipster writes an article about python, and how .NET is written by children writing kludge. I know that's not true. It'll be because Microsoft stopped doing the things that made me keep using them.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#23I'm coming from a classic ASP background as well, and jumped straight to MVC (skipping Web Form entirely). Only later when I did some WPF project, when Web Forms made some sense. I think the whole toolset is basically trying to lure / accommodate the old Win Forms developer to switch to the web (and in this sense, it's a great success). These days, I'm trying to run even leaner by using ServiceStack.Razor, as most of…
> I think the whole (webforms) toolset is basically trying to lure / accommodate the old Win Forms developer to switch to the web
Correct, that was the driver behind webforms. Don't forget that the first version of ASP came out in 1996. Bill Gates' "Internet Tidal Wave" memo was in May 1995.
At the time, Microsoft wanted a way to VB programmers onto the web, and still using familiar, easy tools. And staying inside the Microsoft mothership, of course. ASP grew into ASP.NET Webforms. (.Net 1.0 launched in 2002)
If one was familiar with VB or .Net and winforms, ASP and webforms wasn't too much of a leap. But the abstraction was slow and leaky to work with, and the rendered html contained huge hidden state fields and other oddities. So a new generation of devs who grew up with the web generally greeted it with "WTF!". That's where ASP MVC comes in.
IMHO the wheel has turned far since then; On windows 8, JavaScript is a language for developing desktop apps, so that web developers can try their hand at desktop - the reverse of the situation that Webforms set out to address.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#24i think the "server down" message on your website right now probably speaks as loudly to the topic at hand as any comment here.
More importantly I feel like this story has been told already a hundred times.
Im more compelled by the reasons people either stick with or move to ASP.NET. I would agree that for a great many use cases there are potentially better and less costly tools than this stack, and as a .Net contractor by trade I'm (privately) one of its biggest critics. But big (non-tech) businesses love Microsoft (rightly or wrongly), and as a result, in my local market i can provide for my family a lot better by staying put.
I appreciate the benefits of being at the cutting edge, but I feel there are hidden costs for some that aren't obvious.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#25Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I've been developing the .NET stack for 10 years now and would have to say straight ASP.NET is the easiest way to add the most horrible amount of bloat to your pages and bring about horrible performance.
My gut feel is that it was made to allow application developers to build intranet sites without having to worry about the stateless nature of HTTP. The result was a woeful viewstate that got slugged between the server and client, plus all the woeful bloated libraries that came along with it.
I moved to MVC as soon as it was released and have never looked back. My new project ( www.entomic.com ) is in MVC4 with AngularJS, Coffeescript and Scss and it's absolute gravy. Need to expose some DB objects to the client? Two clicks and I have a full set of REST apis for it. Add to that the LINQ javascript library and the whole thing's a cinch.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#26I moved to C# from Java back in 2001 for the RAD projects I had (still using C++ a lot when necessary though.) C# was a great language and it was faster than Java back then. But for the last couple of years all my RAD projects are now in JavaScript and it wouldn't go back. JavaScript frees me up, where as with C# I feel like I am in a straightjacket where I am forced to write a lot of boilerplate code just to do some…
It's the right tool for the right job. C# is second to none for server side work and JavaScript is great for the client side stuff. Node makes it interesting but i'd imagine the [server side] debugging support is a while from being at the level C# offers.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#27Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I've been developing the .NET stack for 10 years now and would have to say straight ASP.NET is the easiest way to add the most horrible amount of bloat to your pages and bring about horrible performance. My gut feel is that it was made to allow application developers to build intranet sites without having to worry about the stateless nature of HTTP. The result w…
Nitpicker: MVC is part of ASP.NET. You probably meant ASP.NET Webforms in your first paragraph. ;)
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#28His thoughts on ASP.NET WebForms are just; it's a piece of crap trying to make websites have state and you should stay away from it as far as possible.
I am a .NET developer like the poster, also been with the framework since the first beta (doing not just web, but also windows development), and I've had my share of frustrations with ASP.NET WebForms as well, but I quickly noticed that I could use Generic handlers (.ashx) to have a stateless experience, unlike the normal pages, which allowed me to add AJAX Handlers that did not suffer all the drawbacks. I just made simple HTML, added my own Ajax Requests (before jQuery) and had a blazing fast web app without all the fake 'state' that ASP.NET WebForms added.
Once MVC came around the corner, you basically get the Generic Hander + a way to properly structure your code. Once the Razor view engine came to be, there was also a way to maintain proper templates.
All in all, ASP.NET MVC has been great; you get all your .NET code for the back end, just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript on the front end, and no more fake 'state'.
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#29Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I've been developing the .NET stack for 10 years now and would have to say straight ASP.NET is the easiest way to add the most horrible amount of bloat to your pages and bring about horrible performance. My gut feel is that it was made to allow application developers to build intranet sites without having to worry about the stateless nature of HTTP. The result w…
Nitpicker: MVC is part of ASP.NET. You probably meant ASP.NET Webforms in your first paragraph. ;)
certainly did, thanks
Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET
#30Strange post, now when ASP.NET looks better than ever: MVC, WebAPI, ServiceStack, Nancy and all other micro frameworks, SignalR, OWIN/Katana middleware, whole SPA story, decent ORM (EF v5/6), small ORMs like Massive, Dapper, SimpleData ...
Which means that author really doesn't know whats going on in .net web ecosystem, works in big old company that still uses Cobol, or has just have a head stuck in the sand.
Sure, big companies still uses WebForms, but what should they to after investing years and years into developing application? Rewrite everything every few years when some new shinny toy comes out?