5 ms·

Ask HN: Getting Started on MSFT Web Stack vs Other Frameworks/Platforms

11 points by BrandonWatson 18y ago

I have been in the LAMP stack for the last 9 years, and RoR and Django most recently. I built my last company (which we sold - IMSafer) on RoR. I am just now starting to wrap my brain around C#, ASP.NET and other parts of the MSFT stack. What I am most interested in are people's actual experiences with trying to on-board with the MSFT stack. Specifcally, the younger hackers, i.e. 25 and under. Let's try to keep it factual, and leave invectives out. You can see my personal thoughts about all this at www.n00bnotes.com.

mark_ellul 18y ago
After 4yrs developing on the MSFT stack, I can say that it provides a nice end 2 end experience, especially using VS IDE. Now with Mono your deployment options are more open as well, which I find useful. My only gripe is the cost of the stack, if you are hosting your own servers. I also found it hard to debug live environments, as it was hard to do introspection without bring the whole system to a halt.
walesmd 18y ago
I come from a LAMP background (learning Ruby now). What I have seen - in my experience (25 year old, military making the transition to a NSA contractor) is: LAMP and open-source is where it's at for the true innovators on the web. Your startups and companies that go out and try new things, will use some form of open source stack. A Microsoft Stack is prevalent when working within "the establishment," for the man, or in Enterprise level development. These are commonly workcenters in which they rely on the support and testing made available by Microsoft - it is a key factor in their decision to follow that stack. It's not always set in stone that way - my new job is a complete Microsft Stack (IIS, MS SQL) with the exception of the language (PHP). Every now and then, even the man, gets a little spunky and tries something new.
spoiledtechie 18y ago
I am a big supporter of MSFT stack. I am a first time programmer out of college, being 24 now and 2 years on the job I would say it should be taught in school. They did a extremely good job with C# and it is becoming more dynamic with the "var" keyword. There IDE is out of this world which is just an amazing tool. It allows for extensions just like firefox in which there are tons out there. They allow you to talk to every type of server or data set with the new LINQ technology which allows going through tables absolutely quick. It is highly functional beating most of the competitors on bench tests. Look up myspace asp.net case study. The framework is solid and over all my time working on it, I haven't found a bug except one that existed in their ajax controls contributed by the community. Its a bit hard to pick up when you have had no programming experience, but it can be compared to syntactical to C++ and Java. Hope that helps.
- BrandonWatson 18y ago
  This is a good start, and very appreciated. I have found that asp.net is very rough on the brain when you are used to RoR and Django. Any thoughts on that?
  - friism 18y ago
    I agree, ASP.Net bends over backwards to give a winforms-like experience (which invariably it doesn't). Some features (databinding?) seem to have been incorporated just to enable drag'n drop visual development, which is only really useful when recording screencasts and giving demos. Just go with MS MVC if you like RoR.
- inklesspen 18y ago
  "I would say it should be taught in school." That depends on what you go to school for. If you're going for training in Microsoft technologies -- to a technical college or the like, that's fine. If you're going to what's supposed to be a computer science program, they should teach general computing principles using, whenever possible, free software that has been around for a while and will continue to be around for a while. (Yes, that means they shouldn't teach Rails either.)
  - blasdel 18y ago
    Yes, Computer Science departments should not be running damn vocational programs.
- blasdel 18y ago
  The "var" keyword in C# 3.0 has nothing to do with dynamic type-checking whatsoever. It's just basic static type-inference that the compiler was doing already (just only exposing through error messages). I hate how the noob brigades are swapping the meanings of dynamic type-checking and static type-inference at every availably opportunity.
friism 18y ago
I agree with spoiledtechie that C# is a nice programming language. Recent versions enable very concise higher-order functional (=fun) code to be written. The generics implementation has few warts and tooling is good. Another gem is SQL Server, even the Express version is fast and has solid backup-restore features. Powershell provides a (still somewhat embryonic) scripting environment. One nuisance is the relative dearth of free-free software. The thinking seems to go, that because MS gets money, then so should developers of small utils and such. It gives the entire ecosystem a slightly different feel, and you often find yourself paying $10 or similar for small, almost-trivial add-ons, that would have been free on other platforms where a tradition of sharing for the good of all is the norm (codeplex -- I think -- have helped in this regard).
- BrandonWatson 18y ago
  This is a very interesting point...do you have any suggestion for the types of tools that you would want to see be free which aren't? Would contests from MSFT help in this regard? What kind of investment could they make on this problem which would resonate with this audience?
  - friism 18y ago
    The MVP programme is highly regarded, I think -- perhaps that could be be amended to celebrate open source contributions to a wider degree or a parallel programme established. Codeplex and Microsoft releasing open source code in general (eg. Oxite) probably helps too. Microsoft engineers openly working on projects not originating at MS (FacebookToolkit, say) might be a welcome move too.
  - arebop 18y ago
    Until Windows is a free platform, I think you'll always find that it's relatively difficult to find, use, and develop free software there and that the users of the platform will tend to be people who care less about free software. Having said that, things would be better for free software contributors and users if Microsoft were merely passively uninterested in software freedom. I think the first thing for them to do is to stop actively opposing the free software community. Microsoft has repeatedly attacked free software projects on the .NET platform, from NUnit to NAnt to NDoc, by launching alternatives with few or no technical advantages. This not only destroys momentum, but it strengthens the cultural tendency among Microsoft customers to distrust anything that does not originate in Redmond. Lately Microsoft has released some of their software under liberal licensing terms. I think this won't help much, so long as they discourage and hamper participation beyond consumption by members of the public.
abyssknight 18y ago
I came from a PHP and Coldfusion background and jumped into VB.NET/ASP.NET development after some brief self training through our company training portal. Basically, they gave me a copy of VS2008 and said okay, "We have this project that is behind and we need help, do you think you can handle it?" I had a 2 day training on the internal corporate framework and then I was unleashed on the codebase. I would say it took maybe a month for me to 'get it' but after that it was just a matter of code reviews and common sense. If you can write good code in one language, you should be able to translate it over. That said, the event model is a bit different than the straight scripting in PHP or legacy CF. Once you get used to it you're going to feel spoiled. In the WebForms model, a lot is already done for you. Templates are built in, grids are built in, paging is built in... It can almost be annoying how much is built in, but then you realize how little time it takes to get things done. You have more time to spend on real business logic, which is a good thing. I would recommend checking out ASP.NET MVC RC1 if you're coming from Rails and Django. Less is built in, but it better suits the design patterns you've come from. The languages are the same, so if you learn WebForms first it doesn't matter: VB and C# are standalone. Once you learn them, you can use them anywhere whether its the web, GUI apps, or console batch code.
- BrandonWatson 18y ago
  I was lucky enough to discover ASP.NET MVC a couple of days ago, and it's much, much better. I think ASP.NET is fine for internal development, but for anyone looking to build consumer sites, is it a reasonable tool? Yes, I know MySpace is on it, but when I look at PHP adoption, and use of Rails/Django, I find people are willing to try that "new hotness" but just don't like MSFT. Someone told me that they didn't learn ASP.NET because they didn't think it would help their resume (for startup type jobs - for IT it's good). Is that a generally held view/opinion?
  - ahpeeyem 18y ago
    That's definitely the way I see it -- hardly any startups use ASP.NET, but it's everywhere in corporate environments. I guess it doesn't make as much sense to build your product on a platform that's controlled by a company who may either turn off support for it (eg. VB6 -> VB.NET not being backwards compatible), whereas an open source community isn't going to disappear overnight and if it does, you can maintain the platform yourself - at least in theory.
arebop 18y ago
The ASP.NET MVC framework is a pretty close imitation of RoR. The traditional ASP.NET framework is an attempt to shoehorn the Web into the Windows Forms conception of the world. One thing that MS MVC doesn't do particularly nicely is to capture the declarative character of ASP.NET 1.1; the default view templating machinery leads to a comparatively ugly mix of literal markup and imperative inclusions of C#. But, this may not be a severe problem for you in practice, and anyway you can use other view template subsystems. I think if you're starting out, you should stick with MVC. It harmonizes better with the wider architecture of the Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/), and it doesn't suffer from much accumulated cruft.
- ahpeeyem 18y ago
  I'd agree with this comment that MVC is a lot nicer without the overhead of everything that comes with pretending you're building a Windows Forms app -- it's definitely in better harmony with the web's architecture and you get more control over the HTML you're outputting. As others have said the databinding and drag+drop features are often useless and you spend a big chunk of your time working around the framework to get it to do something that doesn't /quite/ fit the drag and drop model, or figuring out exactly which event you need to handle to get things to happen in the right order (Page_PreInit, Page_Init, Page_Load, or Page_PreRender?). But also as others have said, the C# language and the Visual Studio IDE are really nice, and while I haven't developed anything serious with the MVC framework yet, it promises to remove the frustration of endlessly working around the framework's artificially imposed complexity.
tomh- 18y ago
I think if you are going to develop web applications you are better off with a dynamic language, recompiling large projects is a time killer and can get anoying. Another thing that is you might not like is that in general the opensource community for c# is not as big as other platforms have. On the other hand the technologies are nice and fast, but for .NET it is all about tooling which can make you lazy and it can get in the way if you do not understand whats going on under the engine. You can pretty much forget about being productive without Visual Studio. If you wanna geek around in a command-line interface, then .NET is not for you. If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. I'm Microsoft partner and get all the software for a good price, but I'm not convinced that I would be more productive than with python and django.
- BrandonWatson 18y ago
  You raise an interesting point - is the love affair with non-MSFT stuff because it is perceived as being "harder" and thus jacking up geek cred? I was joking with someone that vbscript blew the opportunity to become what PHP is now. Any reaction to that?
  - mikeytown2 18y ago
    The "new" VB is called AutoIt http://www.autoitscript.com/ http://www.autoitscript.com/
- johns 18y ago
  If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. This is completely false. There's a whole movement (http://altdotnet.org/ http://altdotnet.org/) of developers not doing it Microsoft's way and getting along just fine.
  - tomh- 18y ago
    You are right, but it doesn't feel the same as for example using freemarker instead of JSF or whatever. My point was more, if you start using some non-MS projects and you want to look up more information about how other people use it, that information might not be there or you will have a hard time finding it. If you are new to .net this can be a quite anoying. There are always exceptions for everything, but I wouldn't recommend someone new to .net diving straight into these alternative things.
physcab 18y ago
I am 24 and have also been in the LAMP stack for the past year until I began programming as an unpaid intern for a local web development company. The web company uses a MS stack and I have LOVED it. I have a physics background, so I never really "learned" how to code, and picking up PHP felt disjointed. One thing that I have appreciated about MS is the consistency. The IDE is wonderful.
- BrandonWatson 18y ago
  I really thought this topic was going to bring the haters...and yet the majority of the commentary has been uniformly positive. What is MSFT doing wrong, then, that more people aren't building web apps on their stack? For the record, Visual Studio is amazing. My buddies use VI. Whatever works, but I love VS.
  - krakensden 18y ago
    Deployment is less convenient (fewer Windows webhosts, especially on the low end). If you don't run Windows, Visual Studio becomes less attractive, cutting out the free unix and Mac crowd. Also, their marketing is just... not as nice. Compare rubyonrails.org to asp.net. One says 'Web development that doesn't hurt', and has big clickable pictures. The other is ugly and seems to be selling stuff. When you're just starting out, the little things like that matter.
    - BrandonWatson 18y ago
      What an interesting point...yes, the sites have very different looks and feels, for sure. I wonder how many newbies get scared off from ASP.net from the ASP.net site.
mattchew 18y ago
My ASP.NET is a little rusty, but I did a fair bit upon a time. Bottom line, if you drink the Kool-Aid and do it their way, it's not so bad. If you try to translate some other web stack concepts into ASP.NET, you're going to be very frustrated. Specific things to understand: Page cycle. Critical. ASP.NET events. Viewstate (nice if you don't lean too hard on it) App_Code/App_Data directories. Master pages (heh) Also MS has some funky way of handling javascript that is non-standard. You add a javascript handler in Page_Load or something like that. I wasn't doing JS back then so can't tell you more. If use a lot of JS you'll want to understand how the IDs for ASP.NET controls are generated. I tried to use a UserControl in a project and wasn't satisfied, couldn't get the different pieces to see each other and talk to each other correctly. Try before you fly. I'd recommend finding a source of examples and starting there. (P.S. If anyone else is curious like me about why someone would want to move from RoR & Django to ASP.NET, read the first post on n00bnotes, it's explained there.)
- johns 18y ago
  This is mostly outdated information and these issues can be avoided by using ASP.NET MVC instead of Webforms.
johns 18y ago
I've been using .NET full-time for 3.5 years. There are two types of .NET developers. The first group uses the * View controls, uses the designer, does everything (or most things) declaratively and generally conforms to the Microsoft way. Then there's another group of developers that care about design patterns, maintainability, testability, and everything else that goes along with being a good programmer, not just a good employee. I started out in the first group and now I'm in the second. It's a totally different world. Microsoft has made a lot of effort lately to improve their appeal to hackers. They have free (Express) editions of their tools. IIS is still free. If you want the full-blown tools, they're available for very cheap (BizSpark) for startups. They're releasing more and more source code everyday (you can step through the .NET Framework core while debugging in VS2008) and CodePlex is helping bulk up the available OSS libraries for .NET. It's very rare when I need a library and there isn't an open source one or its included in the framework. ASP.NET MVC is an excellent framework and eliminates most of the problems Webforms has. Webforms has its place in corps for the first type of developer I listed above, but MVC is made for the second. I wouldn't spend anytime with Webforms if I were just starting out. Save yourself the headaches. I think the quality of C# 3.0 has been covered enough. If you like dynamic languages, IronPython and IronRuby rely on the Dynamic Language Runtime which will be included in .NET 4. C# is getting support for interopping with dynamic languages. F# is purely functional and will be a first-class language with tool support coming up in VS2010.
johns 18y ago
You should have probably disclosed up front that you work for Microsoft. As much as I like .NET, I like full disclosure more.
- blasdel 18y ago
  Wow, you're right: Brandon Watson ... is a board member of the Family Online Safety Institute and a former Microsoft manager. I have been hacking away in Python for a couple years, but now that I am in the Developer Platform Marketing division at Microsoft... That's a banning! Brandon founded IMSafer in 2006 in response to the growing threat of online predators and the lack of effective tools for parents. He's an opportunistic ass, evangelizing about the imminent paedogeddon... IMSafer uses an advance language analysis engine to decipher the cryptic language used in IM conversations and on MySpace message boards, scanning for language that is dangerous, threatening or sexual in nature. In addition, IMSafer monitors MySpace accounts and reports changes made to any age, name or location disclosed. ...and a snake oil salesman too!
  - drhowarddrfine 18y ago
    Only a Microsoft person would stoop so low. When your browser and stock price is losing market share and value like crazy, you have to resort to dirty tricks to save your job.
    - blasdel 18y ago
      It seems like it might be a hail mary for him, considering this quote from his blog: Now that I have been working in the Developer and Platform Tools marketing group at Microsoft for close to a year, I have decided that it’s probably a good idea for me to be technically proficient in our own technologies.
      - BrandonWatson 18y ago
        Again, apologies. The last thing I want is to upset this community. I am Brandon Watson, and I work at Microsoft. I am not, nor would I, trying to hide that. I asked the original question with genuine interest in the opinions of this community about the MSFT stack. I'm an HN addict, and consider it a valuable knowledge discovery (links, blogs, products, answers, philosphical questions) resouce.

11 points by BrandonWatson 18y ago

mark_ellul 18y ago

After 4yrs developing on the MSFT stack, I can say that it provides a nice end 2 end experience, especially using VS IDE. Now with Mono your deployment options are more open as well, which I find useful. My only gripe is the cost of the stack, if you are hosting your own servers. I also found it hard to debug live environments, as it was hard to do introspection without bring the whole system to a halt.

walesmd 18y ago

I come from a LAMP background (learning Ruby now). What I have seen - in my experience (25 year old, military making the transition to a NSA contractor) is: LAMP and open-source is where it's at for the true innovators on the web. Your startups and companies that go out and try new things, will use some form of open source stack. A Microsoft Stack is prevalent when working within "the establishment," for the man, or in Enterprise level development. These are commonly workcenters in which they rely on the support and testing made available by Microsoft - it is a key factor in their decision to follow that stack. It's not always set in stone that way - my new job is a complete Microsft Stack (IIS, MS SQL) with the exception of the language (PHP). Every now and then, even the man, gets a little spunky and tries something new.

spoiledtechie 18y ago

I am a big supporter of MSFT stack. I am a first time programmer out of college, being 24 now and 2 years on the job I would say it should be taught in school. They did a extremely good job with C# and it is becoming more dynamic with the "var" keyword. There IDE is out of this world which is just an amazing tool. It allows for extensions just like firefox in which there are tons out there. They allow you to talk to every type of server or data set with the new LINQ technology which allows going through tables absolutely quick. It is highly functional beating most of the competitors on bench tests. Look up myspace asp.net case study. The framework is solid and over all my time working on it, I haven't found a bug except one that existed in their ajax controls contributed by the community. Its a bit hard to pick up when you have had no programming experience, but it can be compared to syntactical to C++ and Java. Hope that helps.

BrandonWatson 18y ago
This is a good start, and very appreciated. I have found that asp.net is very rough on the brain when you are used to RoR and Django. Any thoughts on that?
- friism 18y ago
  I agree, ASP.Net bends over backwards to give a winforms-like experience (which invariably it doesn't). Some features (databinding?) seem to have been incorporated just to enable drag'n drop visual development, which is only really useful when recording screencasts and giving demos. Just go with MS MVC if you like RoR.
inklesspen 18y ago
"I would say it should be taught in school." That depends on what you go to school for. If you're going for training in Microsoft technologies -- to a technical college or the like, that's fine. If you're going to what's supposed to be a computer science program, they should teach general computing principles using, whenever possible, free software that has been around for a while and will continue to be around for a while. (Yes, that means they shouldn't teach Rails either.)
- blasdel 18y ago
  Yes, Computer Science departments should not be running damn vocational programs.
blasdel 18y ago
The "var" keyword in C# 3.0 has nothing to do with dynamic type-checking whatsoever. It's just basic static type-inference that the compiler was doing already (just only exposing through error messages). I hate how the noob brigades are swapping the meanings of dynamic type-checking and static type-inference at every availably opportunity.

friism 18y ago

I agree with spoiledtechie that C# is a nice programming language. Recent versions enable very concise higher-order functional (=fun) code to be written. The generics implementation has few warts and tooling is good. Another gem is SQL Server, even the Express version is fast and has solid backup-restore features. Powershell provides a (still somewhat embryonic) scripting environment. One nuisance is the relative dearth of free-free software. The thinking seems to go, that because MS gets money, then so should developers of small utils and such. It gives the entire ecosystem a slightly different feel, and you often find yourself paying $10 or similar for small, almost-trivial add-ons, that would have been free on other platforms where a tradition of sharing for the good of all is the norm (codeplex -- I think -- have helped in this regard).

BrandonWatson 18y ago
This is a very interesting point...do you have any suggestion for the types of tools that you would want to see be free which aren't? Would contests from MSFT help in this regard? What kind of investment could they make on this problem which would resonate with this audience?
- friism 18y ago
  The MVP programme is highly regarded, I think -- perhaps that could be be amended to celebrate open source contributions to a wider degree or a parallel programme established. Codeplex and Microsoft releasing open source code in general (eg. Oxite) probably helps too. Microsoft engineers openly working on projects not originating at MS (FacebookToolkit, say) might be a welcome move too.
- arebop 18y ago
  Until Windows is a free platform, I think you'll always find that it's relatively difficult to find, use, and develop free software there and that the users of the platform will tend to be people who care less about free software. Having said that, things would be better for free software contributors and users if Microsoft were merely passively uninterested in software freedom. I think the first thing for them to do is to stop actively opposing the free software community. Microsoft has repeatedly attacked free software projects on the .NET platform, from NUnit to NAnt to NDoc, by launching alternatives with few or no technical advantages. This not only destroys momentum, but it strengthens the cultural tendency among Microsoft customers to distrust anything that does not originate in Redmond. Lately Microsoft has released some of their software under liberal licensing terms. I think this won't help much, so long as they discourage and hamper participation beyond consumption by members of the public.

abyssknight 18y ago

I came from a PHP and Coldfusion background and jumped into VB.NET/ASP.NET development after some brief self training through our company training portal. Basically, they gave me a copy of VS2008 and said okay, "We have this project that is behind and we need help, do you think you can handle it?" I had a 2 day training on the internal corporate framework and then I was unleashed on the codebase. I would say it took maybe a month for me to 'get it' but after that it was just a matter of code reviews and common sense. If you can write good code in one language, you should be able to translate it over. That said, the event model is a bit different than the straight scripting in PHP or legacy CF. Once you get used to it you're going to feel spoiled. In the WebForms model, a lot is already done for you. Templates are built in, grids are built in, paging is built in... It can almost be annoying how much is built in, but then you realize how little time it takes to get things done. You have more time to spend on real business logic, which is a good thing. I would recommend checking out ASP.NET MVC RC1 if you're coming from Rails and Django. Less is built in, but it better suits the design patterns you've come from. The languages are the same, so if you learn WebForms first it doesn't matter: VB and C# are standalone. Once you learn them, you can use them anywhere whether its the web, GUI apps, or console batch code.

BrandonWatson 18y ago
I was lucky enough to discover ASP.NET MVC a couple of days ago, and it's much, much better. I think ASP.NET is fine for internal development, but for anyone looking to build consumer sites, is it a reasonable tool? Yes, I know MySpace is on it, but when I look at PHP adoption, and use of Rails/Django, I find people are willing to try that "new hotness" but just don't like MSFT. Someone told me that they didn't learn ASP.NET because they didn't think it would help their resume (for startup type jobs - for IT it's good). Is that a generally held view/opinion?
- ahpeeyem 18y ago
  That's definitely the way I see it -- hardly any startups use ASP.NET, but it's everywhere in corporate environments. I guess it doesn't make as much sense to build your product on a platform that's controlled by a company who may either turn off support for it (eg. VB6 -> VB.NET not being backwards compatible), whereas an open source community isn't going to disappear overnight and if it does, you can maintain the platform yourself - at least in theory.

arebop 18y ago

The ASP.NET MVC framework is a pretty close imitation of RoR. The traditional ASP.NET framework is an attempt to shoehorn the Web into the Windows Forms conception of the world. One thing that MS MVC doesn't do particularly nicely is to capture the declarative character of ASP.NET 1.1; the default view templating machinery leads to a comparatively ugly mix of literal markup and imperative inclusions of C#. But, this may not be a severe problem for you in practice, and anyway you can use other view template subsystems. I think if you're starting out, you should stick with MVC. It harmonizes better with the wider architecture of the Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/), and it doesn't suffer from much accumulated cruft.

ahpeeyem 18y ago
I'd agree with this comment that MVC is a lot nicer without the overhead of everything that comes with pretending you're building a Windows Forms app -- it's definitely in better harmony with the web's architecture and you get more control over the HTML you're outputting. As others have said the databinding and drag+drop features are often useless and you spend a big chunk of your time working around the framework to get it to do something that doesn't /quite/ fit the drag and drop model, or figuring out exactly which event you need to handle to get things to happen in the right order (Page_PreInit, Page_Init, Page_Load, or Page_PreRender?). But also as others have said, the C# language and the Visual Studio IDE are really nice, and while I haven't developed anything serious with the MVC framework yet, it promises to remove the frustration of endlessly working around the framework's artificially imposed complexity.

tomh- 18y ago

I think if you are going to develop web applications you are better off with a dynamic language, recompiling large projects is a time killer and can get anoying. Another thing that is you might not like is that in general the opensource community for c# is not as big as other platforms have. On the other hand the technologies are nice and fast, but for .NET it is all about tooling which can make you lazy and it can get in the way if you do not understand whats going on under the engine. You can pretty much forget about being productive without Visual Studio. If you wanna geek around in a command-line interface, then .NET is not for you. If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. I'm Microsoft partner and get all the software for a good price, but I'm not convinced that I would be more productive than with python and django.

BrandonWatson 18y ago
You raise an interesting point - is the love affair with non-MSFT stuff because it is perceived as being "harder" and thus jacking up geek cred? I was joking with someone that vbscript blew the opportunity to become what PHP is now. Any reaction to that?
- mikeytown2 18y ago
  The "new" VB is called AutoIt http://www.autoitscript.com/ http://www.autoitscript.com/
johns 18y ago
If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. This is completely false. There's a whole movement (http://altdotnet.org/ http://altdotnet.org/) of developers not doing it Microsoft's way and getting along just fine.
- tomh- 18y ago
  You are right, but it doesn't feel the same as for example using freemarker instead of JSF or whatever. My point was more, if you start using some non-MS projects and you want to look up more information about how other people use it, that information might not be there or you will have a hard time finding it. If you are new to .net this can be a quite anoying. There are always exceptions for everything, but I wouldn't recommend someone new to .net diving straight into these alternative things.

physcab 18y ago

I am 24 and have also been in the LAMP stack for the past year until I began programming as an unpaid intern for a local web development company. The web company uses a MS stack and I have LOVED it. I have a physics background, so I never really "learned" how to code, and picking up PHP felt disjointed. One thing that I have appreciated about MS is the consistency. The IDE is wonderful.

BrandonWatson 18y ago
I really thought this topic was going to bring the haters...and yet the majority of the commentary has been uniformly positive. What is MSFT doing wrong, then, that more people aren't building web apps on their stack? For the record, Visual Studio is amazing. My buddies use VI. Whatever works, but I love VS.
- krakensden 18y ago
  Deployment is less convenient (fewer Windows webhosts, especially on the low end). If you don't run Windows, Visual Studio becomes less attractive, cutting out the free unix and Mac crowd. Also, their marketing is just... not as nice. Compare rubyonrails.org to asp.net. One says 'Web development that doesn't hurt', and has big clickable pictures. The other is ugly and seems to be selling stuff. When you're just starting out, the little things like that matter.
  - BrandonWatson 18y ago
    What an interesting point...yes, the sites have very different looks and feels, for sure. I wonder how many newbies get scared off from ASP.net from the ASP.net site.

mattchew 18y ago

My ASP.NET is a little rusty, but I did a fair bit upon a time. Bottom line, if you drink the Kool-Aid and do it their way, it's not so bad. If you try to translate some other web stack concepts into ASP.NET, you're going to be very frustrated. Specific things to understand: Page cycle. Critical. ASP.NET events. Viewstate (nice if you don't lean too hard on it) App_Code/App_Data directories. Master pages (heh) Also MS has some funky way of handling javascript that is non-standard. You add a javascript handler in Page_Load or something like that. I wasn't doing JS back then so can't tell you more. If use a lot of JS you'll want to understand how the IDs for ASP.NET controls are generated. I tried to use a UserControl in a project and wasn't satisfied, couldn't get the different pieces to see each other and talk to each other correctly. Try before you fly. I'd recommend finding a source of examples and starting there. (P.S. If anyone else is curious like me about why someone would want to move from RoR & Django to ASP.NET, read the first post on n00bnotes, it's explained there.)

johns 18y ago
This is mostly outdated information and these issues can be avoided by using ASP.NET MVC instead of Webforms.

johns 18y ago

I've been using .NET full-time for 3.5 years. There are two types of .NET developers. The first group uses the * View controls, uses the designer, does everything (or most things) declaratively and generally conforms to the Microsoft way. Then there's another group of developers that care about design patterns, maintainability, testability, and everything else that goes along with being a good programmer, not just a good employee. I started out in the first group and now I'm in the second. It's a totally different world. Microsoft has made a lot of effort lately to improve their appeal to hackers. They have free (Express) editions of their tools. IIS is still free. If you want the full-blown tools, they're available for very cheap (BizSpark) for startups. They're releasing more and more source code everyday (you can step through the .NET Framework core while debugging in VS2008) and CodePlex is helping bulk up the available OSS libraries for .NET. It's very rare when I need a library and there isn't an open source one or its included in the framework. ASP.NET MVC is an excellent framework and eliminates most of the problems Webforms has. Webforms has its place in corps for the first type of developer I listed above, but MVC is made for the second. I wouldn't spend anytime with Webforms if I were just starting out. Save yourself the headaches. I think the quality of C# 3.0 has been covered enough. If you like dynamic languages, IronPython and IronRuby rely on the Dynamic Language Runtime which will be included in .NET 4. C# is getting support for interopping with dynamic languages. F# is purely functional and will be a first-class language with tool support coming up in VS2010.

johns 18y ago

You should have probably disclosed up front that you work for Microsoft. As much as I like .NET, I like full disclosure more.

blasdel 18y ago
Wow, you're right: Brandon Watson ... is a board member of the Family Online Safety Institute and a former Microsoft manager. I have been hacking away in Python for a couple years, but now that I am in the Developer Platform Marketing division at Microsoft... That's a banning! Brandon founded IMSafer in 2006 in response to the growing threat of online predators and the lack of effective tools for parents. He's an opportunistic ass, evangelizing about the imminent paedogeddon... IMSafer uses an advance language analysis engine to decipher the cryptic language used in IM conversations and on MySpace message boards, scanning for language that is dangerous, threatening or sexual in nature. In addition, IMSafer monitors MySpace accounts and reports changes made to any age, name or location disclosed. ...and a snake oil salesman too!
- drhowarddrfine 18y ago
  Only a Microsoft person would stoop so low. When your browser and stock price is losing market share and value like crazy, you have to resort to dirty tricks to save your job.
  - blasdel 18y ago
    It seems like it might be a hail mary for him, considering this quote from his blog: Now that I have been working in the Developer and Platform Tools marketing group at Microsoft for close to a year, I have decided that it’s probably a good idea for me to be technically proficient in our own technologies.
    - BrandonWatson 18y ago
      Again, apologies. The last thing I want is to upset this community. I am Brandon Watson, and I work at Microsoft. I am not, nor would I, trying to hide that. I asked the original question with genuine interest in the opinions of this community about the MSFT stack. I'm an HN addict, and consider it a valuable knowledge discovery (links, blogs, products, answers, philosphical questions) resouce.