October 2nd, 2007
Love and Hate: My Relationship with ASP.NET (continued)
Some .NET Love
Nothing is perfect, neither is a beast as complicated as ASP.NET. Every developer finds something he dislikes in it. But in my view, there’s a lot more to love in ASP.NET than to hate.
Before summer I worked on a web application involving lots of AJAX. In essence it was an online game played via browser; persistent world, lots of data going from and to the server, and a quite complex interface (including a poor man’s version of Google Maps). And I didn’t know javascript at that time.
I really liked AJAX.NET because it is consistent with the model used in ASP.NET; that is building web pages out of ready controls. I looked at different AJAX frameworks and I think only Dojo did things in a very similar fashion. Although AJAX.NET has a pretty steep learning curve and forces you to write lots of boilerplate code, in the long run it’s a real time saver and, dare I say, joy to work with.
As a side note: as many other programmers, I also under appreciated javascript.
It may seem strange that I mention AJAX.NET as my favorite feature of ASP.NET, but I stand by it because it made me actually want to work with ASP.NET again. I liked the workflow of writing controls in client and server code, sometime the border between the one and the other seemed to blur (mainly thanks to how easy it is to include web service calls into the whole thing).
Other reasons to like ASP.NET? For me there’s only one: The .NET framework. It’s a strong enough reason not to ditch ASP.NET completely.
I have to admit that all my opinions above were spoken in a vacuum (almost). That is: I didn’t take into account the choices (or lack of them) a developer is forced to make when working on a project, or the fact that working with Microsoft’s software commercially usually costs lots of money. I assumed a free hand and semi-unlimited resources (eg. you already bought all the MS stuff).