ASP.NET Love Hate Relationship

Anyone who has done pure scripting server side e.g. PHP ASP, must have gone pretty bonkers when seeing asp.net code for the first time. I was. It was initially thrilling jumping into asp.net, as you would believe all the great things it will bring.

But then when you look at the code, you can't really make head or tail, or figure out where to start?

Now, coming from a traditional web programming school of thought, you always think top to bottom. Yep, that's how the script runs, from the first line on top, and then just all the way down. If anything goes wrong, you know which line to fix. You also know how to add more "if else" just to make sure some path of logic is executed. But in asp.net, it's just not there.

You have to think events and triggers for those. And how to handle them.

And the worst of it, form inputs, are being replaced by proprietery asp.net tags.

I even went to the point of searching "hate dot net" to justify my feelings. And mind you, I had 2 years doing ASP and some vb dll com programming.

But it had to be overcome, because the benefits are just there. You no longer need to deploy dlls the hard way, just dump them into /bin folder. And there's tons of other benefits as well.

One more thing I need to say. I am not really a fan of drag and drop programming. Yes, I know all of you guys might have seen those MVPs (Microsoft Valued Professionals) doing some presentation hype, and trying to convince you, how easy it seems. hahaha...yes, IDEs does make your life better, but does that mean, anyone can just open the IDE, drag and drop some controls and voila, you have a web app?

Coming from the pre asp.net era, we have to hack javascripts, form inputs and much more just to do form validation, form posting, ajax and some DHTML effects. Yet if I were to advised which language should you start first before jumping into web programming, it would be either asp or php. Because this way, you learn the intricacies of how the lower level work. Once you got a solid foundation of how this layer work, asp.net will be a breeze. And better still, you could hack into certain asp.net controls to make it work for you.

And I heard from a guy who is managing a team of developers, mentioned, his top developer still don't really like dot net for projects. Why? Just because you don't have full control on all the logic on your pages. To do really cool stuff with your own forms, you just have to have certain parts of the page logic. ASP.net controls makes it harder, hence why all the hacks are needed on the controls.

ASP.net could really make faster apps, but that doesn't make it a better app. How good the app is, still depends on the programmer.