I Hate ASP.NET
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 at 6:28PM 3 Comments I volunteered to build a Web site for an area non-profit. The site is being built in partnership with Microsoft, which means it's being done in C# and ASP.NET. So far, I am the only developer working on it, but I may get some help from co-workers and Microsoft resources.
The site isn't anything complicated. Standard mail forms, basic database interaction, and an events calendar. What would take me a week or so in ColdFusion has now been dragging on for a couple of months, and I'm only about to finish the front end - haven't yet started on the admin tool.
I had some limited experience with ASP.NET before I started, but wow. The verbosity of it, the way that they try to make things easy by providing out-of-the-box functionality like a calendar "control" (everything's a "control" to these people) which you take forever to customize the way you want it, the nasty HTML that these controls generate - it's really been an eye-opening experience. Clearly, the .NET framework is incredibly powerful. And if I had the know-how to architect this thing properly by creating components instead of treating it like procedural programming, I'm sure I would be impressed with .NET.
But my impression so far is, .NET is powerful, but incredibly unweildy. I would no more characterize ASP.NET as a rapid application development platform than fly to the moon. .NET is another one of those Microsoft tools that you need to take time to learn to speak their language and think in their mindset before you can really be productive with it. I don't want to slam on it too much, as I know a lot of people swear by it, but while I'm toiling away in freakin' Visual Studio, I keep thinking to myself - there's got to be an easier way.
So I'll probably be wrapped up with this development effort for the next couple of months. I love volunteer work.
Reader Comments (3)
in a moment of total frustration, I googled "i hate asp.net" and got your blog. i couldn't agree more.
Me too..I hate ASP.NET. I hate its controls. I hate the fact that I have no control over what is being sent to the client.
I developed a groupware application in ASP 3.0, www.officezilla.com, that I give away for free.
I agree with you that ASP.Net is not for web developers. It is really for developers coming over from C++ and they want to do websites.
Web sites have always been scripted, HTML is a scripted language, PERL a scripted language, and so on.
By not upgrading ASP 3.0 the scripting language and instead re-developing it into an object based programming language they did PHP and ColdFusion a favor.
But anyone who really learns ASP.net and knows it very well can make a lot of money because of the hype from Microsoft makes ASP.net the only thing you can run your site on and handle a lot of traffic. Which is untrue.
Good coding practices and effecient use of your database matters most to scalability.