

ASP.NET Gets No Respect - johns
http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/453551.aspx

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rit
Here's the big item to note:

All of the sites he notes that are running ASP.net are, as he says "big
traditional businesses". They can afford the licensing costs of MSDN, Windows
servers, a batallion of Microsoft "experts" to help them scale and support
contracts. Oh, and Myspace is not an application I'd ever hold up as a good
examlpe of anything, but I'll admit that it's my own biased opinion (The site
is wildly successful, something I can't deny, but incredibly ugly and has
crappy usability).

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but can someone show me some small startups
using ASP.net successfully? Because to me it appears it only is used by big
monolithic business setups - which would be exactly why it gets a bad rap. If
it's not accessible to the potential entrepeneur, it's going to be difficult
to justify. And when I can setup a Linux server using LAMP for a grand total
of $0, why would I pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees to Microsoft,
for a toolset that I'm not going to be able to find people to develop on?

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cschneid
The biggest issue with ASP.NET for me is that it ignores the underlying
protocol. The writer tries explaining this away, saying that you can get at
the raw http components if you want, but I don't think that matters much when
the default use of ASP.NET is via the web forms model.

Once you're in web forms, you have to pretend like you're not on the web at
all. I cannot apply all the knowledge I've learned from perl, php,
java(jsp/servlet), and ruby on rails.

Basically, it's just not very easy to transfer knowledge of the web over to
the ASP.NET framework. You have to relearn how to do basic tasks, and do it
the microsoft way.

~~~
icey
ASP.Net MVC resolves _some_ of these problems.

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mechanical_fish
_In addition ASP.NET's naming container ID mangling which causes client IDs to
be changed can be very counter productive for styling with CSS and for working
with elements using JavaScript. It's no fun referencing controls with
references like $("#ctl000_StatusCtl_txtNameId") for element selection (with
jQuery here) especially since those generated ID values can change._

Yeah, I sure can't understand why that system gets no respect. What a
headscratcher!

~~~
bdfh42
The only place I have seen such ID "mangling" was when I had to do some work
with an SAP portal - where the portal software was indeed doing some
interesting things to HTML element Ids.

I have built several active ASP.NET sites and I am building another now and I
can say categorically that no such problem exists in the mainstream.

~~~
johns
You must not be working with JavaScript or Master Pages (or if you are, you're
using Microsoft AJAX). Create a master page, then create a placeholder or
panel in a content area, then put a textbox in it and refer to it by its
generated HTML ID attribute (it's probably something like
ctl00_MainContent_Panel1_MyTextBox at this point) in a javascript. Then if you
move it to another panel, the ID changes. That's the mangling he's describing
and it is by far the biggest issue I have with an otherwise solid framework.

