6 ms·

Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I've been developing the .NET stack for 10 years now and would have to say straight ASP.NET is the easie

Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I've been developing the .NET stack for 10 years now and would have to say straight ASP.NET is the easiest way to add the most horrible amount of bloat to your pages and bring about horrible performance. My gut feel is that it was made to allow application developers to build intranet sites without having to worry about the stateless nature of HTTP. The result was a woeful viewstate that got slugged between the server and client, plus all the woeful bloated libraries that came along with it. I moved to MVC as soon as it was released and have never looked back. My new project ( www.entomic.com ) is in MVC4 with AngularJS, Coffeescript and Scss and it's absolute gravy. Need to expose some DB objects to the client? Two clicks and I have a full set of REST apis for it. Add to that the LINQ javascript library and the whole thing's a cinch.

jf22 13y ago
Nitpicker: MVC is part of ASP.NET. You probably meant ASP.NET Webforms in your first paragraph. ;)
- redact207 13y ago
  certainly did, thanks
300bps 13y ago
I'm with you. I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002 because it's not up to snuff with 2013 web development tools. I also made the switch to ASP.NET MVC and can't imagine ever going back to ASP.NET. The unbelievable clean HTML you get, full control over rendering and rapid development is just phenomenal. Most of the anti-Microsoft comments I see on HN are of the "but VB6 is terrible!" and "ASP.NET stinks!" variety from people that stopped looking at Microsoft development tools over a decade ago and are still comparing those old tools to their modern competitors.
- untog 13y ago
  I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002 Because it is still overwhelmingly used today. MS themselves admit that MVC is a tiny proportion of ASP.NET deployments.
- spongle 13y ago
  Sorry signed up to say this - been lurking a while but this one infuriated me terribly. The only reason ASP.Net MVC looks good is because you were a WebForms user before. If you've come from other tech, it's still a stinking pile of crap. 1. The API is totally broken and consists of tonnes of barely testable wrappers (HttpResponseWrapper etc). 2. The attribute model is a pain in the arse. How do you test filters based on attributes effectively? 3. Razor is horrible. I mean really horrible. The semantic difference between inline C# code and JS/HTML is so weak that you end up having to hint the view engine as to what is what. Not only that, the Layout system it uses basically stuffs RAM full of string buffers. If you have a complicated page and thousands of users (like we do), memory goes sky high. Please give me something like Jinja2. 4. The ASP.Net pipeline isn't thread safe at all. It's scary actually. You can't guarantee one module won't set global thread state on another thread. This only happens under heavy load. That is one absolute fucker to debug. 5. MS11-100 broke absolutely fucking everything from downloading Excel files in IE8 and below over SSL, knackering caching etc. This is the norm. Stuff just does this all the time. One day it works, next it doesn't. Now I could spend all day writing this list but I'll surmise it as the whole .Net (web stack) is a stinking shit crock which pains me every day I have to use it. I LONG for the days someone will hire me based on other skillsets but the market is saturated with people who thought it was a great idea and are stuck with it now. (For ref the .net desktop / WPF stuff is wonderful in comparison, apart from Visual Studio which crashes on me so often it's just ugh..).
  - pmarsh 13y ago
    What extensions are you using with Visual Studio? Found vanilla to be really stable, but certain extensions result in some random crashes. But not terribly often.
idProQuo 13y ago
> Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I googled the title and grabbed Google's cache (in text-only form, the real deal wouldn't load for me). http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U8pNBnRiHTkJ:www.ryanbennett.com/general/why-i-moved-away-from-microsoft-asp-net/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U8pNBnR...
hrasyid 13y ago
maybe it was down because it uses ASP.NET?
- rnbennett 13y ago
  Unfortunately because I'm cheap and I am using the smallest Linode plan available. Don't normally get this kind of traffic...
corresation 13y ago
MVC4 with AngularJS Why combine a server-side MVC with a client-side MVC? Honestly the ASP.NET MVC advocacy doesn't make sense to me. It is a solution that half brings .NET developers into the modern era. Using it purely as a service layer is that project essentially trying to maintain relevance in the face of irrelevance.
- Touche 13y ago
  Yep, half-way sounds about right. By default ASP.NET doesn't allow you to GET json, have to override that. Also the routing is not RESTful at all and doesn't handle nesting very well, so you have to find a 3rd party routing library or role your own.
  - narshe 13y ago
    The reason it doesn't allow you to do JSON GET requests is because of the possibility of hijacking. http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/24/json-hijacking.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/24/json-hijacking.aspx Not allowing this by default is a good thing. It will make developers look up the reason it's not working, and hopefully not return an array from the get request. They could have done a runtime exception only if an array was returned, but that's a matter of opinion.
- narshe 13y ago
  Why combine? Because the server side infrastructure is a lot more flexible with MVC (than WebForms) and follows how HTML is supposed to work. If you're developing an API or service, use WebAPI instead. It solves most of the issues people have with MVC. MVC is still simple and easy to use to create services with, and I'd still recommend it to people.
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
For some strange reason that strongly reminds me from Apache Tomcat & Hibernate.

jf22 13y ago

Nitpicker: MVC is part of ASP.NET. You probably meant ASP.NET Webforms in your first paragraph. ;)

redact207 13y ago
certainly did, thanks

300bps 13y ago

I'm with you. I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002 because it's not up to snuff with 2013 web development tools. I also made the switch to ASP.NET MVC and can't imagine ever going back to ASP.NET. The unbelievable clean HTML you get, full control over rendering and rapid development is just phenomenal. Most of the anti-Microsoft comments I see on HN are of the "but VB6 is terrible!" and "ASP.NET stinks!" variety from people that stopped looking at Microsoft development tools over a decade ago and are still comparing those old tools to their modern competitors.

untog 13y ago
I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002 Because it is still overwhelmingly used today. MS themselves admit that MVC is a tiny proportion of ASP.NET deployments.
spongle 13y ago
Sorry signed up to say this - been lurking a while but this one infuriated me terribly. The only reason ASP.Net MVC looks good is because you were a WebForms user before. If you've come from other tech, it's still a stinking pile of crap. 1. The API is totally broken and consists of tonnes of barely testable wrappers (HttpResponseWrapper etc). 2. The attribute model is a pain in the arse. How do you test filters based on attributes effectively? 3. Razor is horrible. I mean really horrible. The semantic difference between inline C# code and JS/HTML is so weak that you end up having to hint the view engine as to what is what. Not only that, the Layout system it uses basically stuffs RAM full of string buffers. If you have a complicated page and thousands of users (like we do), memory goes sky high. Please give me something like Jinja2. 4. The ASP.Net pipeline isn't thread safe at all. It's scary actually. You can't guarantee one module won't set global thread state on another thread. This only happens under heavy load. That is one absolute fucker to debug. 5. MS11-100 broke absolutely fucking everything from downloading Excel files in IE8 and below over SSL, knackering caching etc. This is the norm. Stuff just does this all the time. One day it works, next it doesn't. Now I could spend all day writing this list but I'll surmise it as the whole .Net (web stack) is a stinking shit crock which pains me every day I have to use it. I LONG for the days someone will hire me based on other skillsets but the market is saturated with people who thought it was a great idea and are stuck with it now. (For ref the .net desktop / WPF stuff is wonderful in comparison, apart from Visual Studio which crashes on me so often it's just ugh..).
- pmarsh 13y ago
  What extensions are you using with Visual Studio? Found vanilla to be really stable, but certain extensions result in some random crashes. But not terribly often.

idProQuo 13y ago

> Tried reading this but the site was down... ironically. I googled the title and grabbed Google's cache (in text-only form, the real deal wouldn't load for me). http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U8pNBnRiHTkJ:www.ryanbennett.com/general/why-i-moved-away-from-microsoft-asp-net/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U8pNBnR...

hrasyid 13y ago

maybe it was down because it uses ASP.NET?

rnbennett 13y ago
Unfortunately because I'm cheap and I am using the smallest Linode plan available. Don't normally get this kind of traffic...

corresation 13y ago

MVC4 with AngularJS Why combine a server-side MVC with a client-side MVC? Honestly the ASP.NET MVC advocacy doesn't make sense to me. It is a solution that half brings .NET developers into the modern era. Using it purely as a service layer is that project essentially trying to maintain relevance in the face of irrelevance.

Touche 13y ago
Yep, half-way sounds about right. By default ASP.NET doesn't allow you to GET json, have to override that. Also the routing is not RESTful at all and doesn't handle nesting very well, so you have to find a 3rd party routing library or role your own.
- narshe 13y ago
  The reason it doesn't allow you to do JSON GET requests is because of the possibility of hijacking. http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/24/json-hijacking.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/24/json-hijacking.aspx Not allowing this by default is a good thing. It will make developers look up the reason it's not working, and hopefully not return an array from the get request. They could have done a runtime exception only if an array was returned, but that's a matter of opinion.
narshe 13y ago
Why combine? Because the server side infrastructure is a lot more flexible with MVC (than WebForms) and follows how HTML is supposed to work. If you're developing an API or service, use WebAPI instead. It solves most of the issues people have with MVC. MVC is still simple and easy to use to create services with, and I'd still recommend it to people.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

For some strange reason that strongly reminds me from Apache Tomcat & Hibernate.