ASP.Net is awesome for when you need a quick-and-dirty, internal application to do something and you don't care how good the code is or how efficient it is. I used it (with C#) to build a customer service portal used internally at Fog Creek and was able to build something "good enough" very, very fast... this is the kind of application where you don't care much about speed, you don't care about fonts and layouts, you don't even care about error checking because if it crashes, the person using it comes and asks you what happened and you ask them what they did, and then you tell them not to do that any more if they don't like crashes.
For shrinkwrap apps, internet apps, and anything where you really need polish, you care what your URLs look like, and you want a lot of control over what's going on so you can make it fast, shiny, professional, and bulletproof, the still-beta ASP.NET MVC has proven itself... stackoverflow.com is implemented with MVC and the team is loving it.
Stefan makes an excellent point that ASP.NET's original model was meant to be familiar and comfortable to old-school VB programmers, by providing a thick abstraction over HTML and HTTP that leaks really, really badly. For example half of your app stops working if JavaScript is turned off... even things that look like hyperlinks stop working because they're javascript under the covers... and for a timid VB programmer they suddenly have to deal with much, much more complexity to solve these last mile finishing touch kinds of things.
Conclusion... need a quick and dirty CRUD app for internal purposes that just has to be good enough? ASP.NET is fine... you'll barely have to write any code at all. Building a public-facing app that needs to be slick and polished? If you're using the Microsoft stack, start with ASP.NET MVC.
Conclusion... need a quick and dirty CRUD app for internal purposes that just has to be good enough? ASP.NET is fine... you'll barely have to write any code at all. Building a public-facing app that needs to be slick and polished? If you're using the Microsoft stack, start with ASP.NET MVC.
So ASP.net has become the "toy" framework, replaced by ASP.net MVC, a framework inspired by monorail, which in turn was inspired by rails, the original "toy" framework. Ah, sweet, sweet irony.
Open Source Apps Should Start Innovating - Not Recreating (cli.gs)
also made it to the front page. Charles H. Ferguson has a nice take on this VB/.NET/Java(script)/HTML misery in his book ...not that I agree with him on some issues (like sw patents). But the one who has submitted the original article might know more, since he could have been around there around that time...
"How could you want to obscure what are very easy and simple tools still baffles me"
It's because HTTP/HTML is a very simple tool for what it was created to do: retrieving and displaying static pages.
Everything else is not so simple. As soon as people started to move data entry forms with master detail screens, etc. onto that platform things were getting nasty.
Since Microsoft is the master of master detail forms, or at least of the platform on which most of them have been built, they felt a need to come up with a solution.
And the solution the "company who never understood the web" came up with was ... XMLHTTPRequest. No, seriously, it was ASP.NET. No, wait, it was both! ;-)
I think I mostly agree though I think "quick and dirty" has a negative connotation that is not necessarily justified. A lot of corporate environments has web apps that are only used by 10 or 20 people and which are being transmitted over ultra fast gigabit connections. In those cases the so called "quick and dirty" app is very much a plus in that it cuts down on vital developer time and still allows a company to have a web based applications (with all the advantages therein)
What had been missing until now, at least in an official capacity, was a way to make serious public facing web apps and I think Microsoft has made great strides with their support of Jquery and the ASP.NET MVC project.
From that perspective I think Microsoft is in a really good place right now. Webforms continues to serve that corporate environment that other companies don’t seem to care about and ASP.NET MVC allows them to challenge Rails et al. in the web space.
For shrinkwrap apps, internet apps, and anything where you really need polish, you care what your URLs look like, and you want a lot of control over what's going on so you can make it fast, shiny, professional, and bulletproof, the still-beta ASP.NET MVC has proven itself... stackoverflow.com is implemented with MVC and the team is loving it.
Stefan makes an excellent point that ASP.NET's original model was meant to be familiar and comfortable to old-school VB programmers, by providing a thick abstraction over HTML and HTTP that leaks really, really badly. For example half of your app stops working if JavaScript is turned off... even things that look like hyperlinks stop working because they're javascript under the covers... and for a timid VB programmer they suddenly have to deal with much, much more complexity to solve these last mile finishing touch kinds of things.
Conclusion... need a quick and dirty CRUD app for internal purposes that just has to be good enough? ASP.NET is fine... you'll barely have to write any code at all. Building a public-facing app that needs to be slick and polished? If you're using the Microsoft stack, start with ASP.NET MVC.