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Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

ryanbennett.com

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Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#51

Post by robodale »

josefresco wrote: post #7
chollida1 wrote: post #2

> The vast majority of .NET projects involve working with giant, monolithic, boring, poorly written, legacy “enterprise” products. These products always seem to be 4-8 years old and 2-3 major platform releases behind the current .NET framework To be fair this can be said for pretty much any project written in pretty much any language or framework.

Couldn't agree more. If you want to develop in cutting edge technologies for your weeks-old startup then code away and enjoy living on the edge (with all of it's pros and cons). But almost everything else (not just enterprise) lags behind and for good (many) reason(s). I work for clients and while I'm tempted to offer new technologies, I'm aware that this client will be using this tool for years, most likely as-is. S…

Re-read what josefresco said - because this is the reality.

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#52

Post by hhandoko »

untog wrote: post #47
ehmuidifici wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago, I participated on a interview for a job (in a startup) which requires some skills in ASP.NET. When I started talking to company owner and I said to him that I knew PHP (and ASP.NET too, of course), he started to say that ASP.NET is better because it's paid, expensive and it has a great support from Microsoft... That's all he said about it. Later on, I discovered that almost 7/10 of big companies' IT…

They're not wrong, though. It's all about priorities. With an MS product you do get good support, and someone to shout at if something is not behaving as expected. With open source tech you can submit a patch to fix it yourself.

Which was exactly the sentiment of my manager in previous org: "You can use open source as long as they have commercial support".

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#53

Post by EnderMB »

I'm a .NET developer by day, and I'm definitely a fan. C# is a great language, I've worked on many fun projects, and I've even worked in a .NET startup environment. Many of my experiences do not echo that of the author. Perhaps I'm lucky, but a legacy project for me is a project running .NET 2 and an older CMS version, and compared to Java I'd still pick it. I've used .NET in a number of agencies too, and I'd preferred using it to using PHP. We've even taken a number of failed WordPress projects and have taken them over to Umbraco, and the clients couldn't be happier.

That being said, I consciously made a decision a few years ago to force myself to develop with different tools for personal projets. While I think ASP.NET is a great platform, I've worked in enough .NET shops to see that many .NET devs tend to "just" write C#. They're more than happy to dedicate their entire career to Microsoft, and to disregard any progress made on other platforms.

The biggest blocker for me is using Windows to develop applications. I'm also a big fan of Python, but I'd be lying if I said that I haven't struggled with the transition to using Linux to develop. The terminal is just so powerful, and even though Powershell has made Windows a much better platform to script on, I really don't think it can ever match the terminal. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I would like to be comfortable with the knowledge that if I lost my job, .NET were to stagnate/fall apart, or if I were offered a great job using Python, that I'd be fully capable of putting my .NET hat down and moving into a mid-level role writing Python on a Linux-based environment.

My problem with .NET isn't really a problem. It's a worry that the the Windows platform could alienate me from progress made elsewhere.

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#54

Post by daigoba66 »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #41
swalsh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .…

"today WPF is all but discontinued" This is an interesting claim - WPF is still the main UI framework for writing Desktop apps, right? I don't know of any replacement framework that is preferred by MS for authoring desktop apps (I never use any WinStore apps on my Windows 8 devices).

The last update to WPF was a year ago when .NET 4.5 was released. The current trajectory has major releases about every two years, or whenever there is a major update to .NET itself since it's built-in. Given that Visual Studio itself is now built around many WPF libraries, I don't necessarily see it being deprecated anytime soon (I mean, you can still develop and deploy WinForms-based software even though there aren't any new features on the roadmap). But only time will tell.

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#56

Post by spongle »

300bps wrote: post #40
redact207 wrote: post #25

Tried 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…

I'm with you. I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002 because it's not up to snuff with 2013 web development tools. I also made the switch to ASP.NET MVC and can't imagine ever going back to ASP.NET. The unbelievable clean HTML you get, full control over rendering and rapid development is just phenomenal. Most of the anti-Microsoft comments I see on HN are of…

Sorry signed up to say this - been lurking a while but this one infuriated me terribly.

The only reason ASP.Net MVC looks good is because you were a WebForms user before. If you've come from other tech, it's still a stinking pile of crap.

1. The API is totally broken and consists of tonnes of barely testable wrappers (HttpResponseWrapper etc).

2. The attribute model is a pain in the arse. How do you test filters based on attributes effectively?

3. Razor is horrible. I mean really horrible. The semantic difference between inline C# code and JS/HTML is so weak that you end up having to hint the view engine as to what is what. Not only that, the Layout system it uses basically stuffs RAM full of string buffers. If you have a complicated page and thousands of users (like we do), memory goes sky high. Please give me something like Jinja2.

4. The ASP.Net pipeline isn't thread safe at all. It's scary actually. You can't guarantee one module won't set global thread state on another thread. This only happens under heavy load. That is one absolute fucker to debug.

5. MS11-100 broke absolutely fucking everything from downloading Excel files in IE8 and below over SSL, knackering caching etc. This is the norm. Stuff just does this all the time. One day it works, next it doesn't.

Now I could spend all day writing this list but I'll surmise it as the whole .Net (web stack) is a stinking shit crock which pains me every day I have to use it.

I LONG for the days someone will hire me based on other skillsets but the market is saturated with people who thought it was a great idea and are stuck with it now.

(For ref the .net desktop / WPF stuff is wonderful in comparison, apart from Visual Studio which crashes on me so often it's just ugh..).

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#57

Post by dep_b »

I think if you would look around for alternatives for WebForms around the day it came out it was better than most things at the time. Java had a few horrible frameworks as well and PHP was still in it's phase of stuffing markup, database and logic in one ginormous SQL injection friendly file. The thing that was flawed about it that it was meant to work like a desktop app in WinForms style, yet the HTTP protocol isn't stateful so as soon as you would start to nest controls and route clicks, you were up for some pretty messy wiring up during different phases of loading the page.

I had an introductory course of one hour on Microsoft MVC and the next day I created and deployed a small website from scratch with it. I always basically tell people that are still on WebForms that they don't need to learn something new when they switch to MVC, they just need to forget a lot of the crap they needed to know to work on WebForms. Every day still on WebForms is a wasted day.

The writer seems to have moved from strong typed languages to loosely typed languages. It's pretty unclear to me why he quit using Django and went for JavaScript instead, but the path is pretty clear. I used and use a lot of programming languages and frameworks and I pick whatever seems the most appropriate for the job.

- WordPress for dead easy websites only doing basic stuff - PHP/SLIM/MySQL for very simple webservices - Django whenever I want to do a lot of custom views - Microsoft MVC for larger web projects with a lot of business rules

Statically typed code works better in an IDE as it is easier to predict what code will do (this is one of the reasons Visual Studio with ReSharper is so effective in compile time and pre compile time error checking and refactoring).

I am not sure if I want to maintain all those Node.JS / Ruby / flavor of the month frameworks in eight years either.....probably we will curse it by then too.

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#58

Post by shaydoc »

ASP.NET WebForms was a tragedy of a grand scale. Its bloatedness and obfuscation of the web was truly horrific. I can say this because I am a WebForm veteran. I used it from beta in my 2nd job & even back then I found it incredibly obtuse and uninuitive, especially because I understood the stateless nature of the web and it just kinda flew in the face of that ( probably to appease VB programmers coming to the web ).

Like many people, I was also looking to get rid of all the bloat, fortunately now ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI are proper development solutions that play nicely with the web.

In fact there's alot to admire about the new ASP.NET and how it embraces the web.

My web latest app stack is now a Single Page App of HTML/CSS/JS talking to Restful Services (ASP.NET Web API), just beautiful to work with!

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#59

Post by swalsh »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #41
swalsh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .…

"today WPF is all but discontinued" This is an interesting claim - WPF is still the main UI framework for writing Desktop apps, right? I don't know of any replacement framework that is preferred by MS for authoring desktop apps (I never use any WinStore apps on my Windows 8 devices).

I went to BUILD in June, and attended an overview of what's new in XAML. After the talk, I went up to the guy, and I was like "Wow there's a lot of cool things going on in XAML, how much of this do we get in WPF?" His reply was basically, all of the visual studio enhancements will come to me. However the new controls etc will not. He said WPF is in maintenance mode only for now.

Re: Why I Moved Away From Microsoft ASP.NET

#60

Post by twistedpair »

NKCSS wrote: post #28

His 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 (.…

Was accessing a very slow HMO site yesterday. Peeked at the source and most of the wait was for the 800K ViewState string. Wasn't that hard to decrypt either. I think that is the source of most anti-ASP.Net sentiment.
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