I was a die-hard classic ASP programmer and decided to dive into the .NET world. After all, Microsoft has hyped this framework up so much and it is supposed to be so easy. Can you see the rainbows and lollypops?
I think the biggest thing I was expecting and hoping for was faster and less laborious coding. Being a professional programmer, time equals profit. The faster I can code a quality application, the more money I can bring in. And the company likes that!
So I downloaded the now free Visual Web Developer Express version from Microsoft and loaded it up. I started going through some tutorials to get up to speed on the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and caught on pretty quickly. I have coded many Windows applications in Visual Basic, so this was not much of a learning curve.
Well I have to say I was very disappointed. All the so called easy controls were not so easy and didn’t get me very far toward a finished application. I had to code almost everything by hand and I was very frustrated and didn’t see much benefit of the whole .NET framework. I had already virtually created my classic ASP framework from the years of coding in it. Take a bit of code here and there and tweak it to get the desired result.
Well, I was determined to finish out a project I designated as ASP.NET so I carried on. I googled and read blogs about .NET and just couldn’t see the huge benefit. It would be great for someone just starting to program, but for a seasoned programmer, it wasn’t much help and the time saving was just not there. I almost scrapped .NET on the project just to get the project done in a timely manner.
Everything changed when I finally came accross Telerik and their ASP.NET controls. They have some super nice controls that almost take any hand coding out of the picture. I was now seeing the light and ASP.NET was being redeemed!
These guys at Telerik have it going on and their controls are very advanced, versatile, and have some super cool features such as AJAX built right in. All you have to do is configure your dataset and set the properties of the control and bam you have an application; AJAX, very nice looking, and very fast!
I was now very happy and have fallen in love with ASP.NET. Granted the Telerik controls are not cheap at around $800 per developer head, but it is very worth the expense. The sheer amount of coolness and time saved is well worth the bucks!
I am now in the process of revamping some of our old ASP applications into ASP.NET. This will take some time, but it is a venture I am looking forward to. I may even make a stop down Ruby on Rails street to see what that framework has to offer. Stay tuned for more ASP.NET, ASP, PHP, and Ruby on Rails adventures!
As always, feel free to drop me a line at the office.
Chad Rainey
Senior Web Developer
Media Marketers, Inc.
It’s good you stuck with it and were successful.
Telerik is too slow and buggy when we tested them recently.
Comment by Roger Chen — September 4, 2007 @ 5:37 am
I think that your post show a perspective of the productivity problem not often taken into account. What you basicly write is that ASP is better for _you_ since you know it inside out and you have a ready solution for any problem. Whilst you’re not that common in the .NET environment.
However, once you are familiar with .NET framework and the languages (C# is my favourite, but I have spent many years writing VB.NET code too) then you will become even more productive then you were with ASP.
Added to that is the fact that third party code massively speed up your development cycles.
Comment by Fredrik Andersson — November 21, 2007 @ 8:17 am
Wow, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone claim that classic ASP is more productive than ASP.NET. Get a bit more experience under your belt, I’d say.
Comment by Wes — April 17, 2009 @ 2:11 am
Hi Wes, do you know how to code in ASP 3 at an expert level? Night and day productivity difference in doing an ASP 3 web app and .NET.
.NET, to do it properly, requires so much more planning, classes, and custom controls. I think .NET is good for huge systems that need all that extra stuff. But small websites, it is overkill and takes at least twice as long to do.
I have an experienced .NET guy and I gave him an ASP 3 project with all my classes and code chunks. He is doing the project twice as fast and he has never coded in ASP 3 before! I even think he likes it! As for my PHP guy, he has not come to the dark side, yet…
This is just my 2 cents and experience. I have done both. Have you?
Chad
Comment by chad — April 17, 2009 @ 8:07 am