4 ms·

ASP.NET Gets No Respect

4 points by johns 18y ago

mechanical_fish 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.
cschneid 18y ago
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 18y ago
  ASP.Net MVC resolves _some_ of these problems.
rit 18y ago
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?

4 points by johns 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.

cschneid 18y ago

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 18y ago
ASP.Net MVC resolves _some_ of these problems.

rit 18y ago

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?