Say “net” to ASP.NET

When you’re five years old, Legos are amazing. But by the time you become a professional architect, you feel somewhat limited by the little friends. You hesitate when a client insists you use them to build everything—they’re annoyingly small for a skyscraper and impossibly square for a wigwam, and quite frankly, the omnipresent bumps are starting to drive you mad. In addition, you have to pay a fortune to the Lego company. You point out that one of the projects can be built better and cheaper with royalty-free steel, the other with clay and friggin’ sticks. “But Legos are so easy to use!” the client responds.

Such is the joy of using Microsoft’s ASP.NET. The perk of .NET controls is that you supposedly don’t need to program. You can set most of the controls’ properties by clicking around in the handy development environment. But once some customization is necessary, you’re in trouble: it took me two hours of research to figure out how to enlarge a textbox in GridView edit mode, and about as much time to figure out how to make its cell print ‘NO DATE’ instead of ‘12/31/9999′. These tasks would each take about a minute in Ruby on Rails or PHP. So ASP.NET is easy to use, just like Lego wigwams are manifestations of great design.

“Design, shmesign,” you say. “I’m a business person and everyone uses Microsoft. Give me a web app fast and give it to me cheap! I need numbers!” When you choose ASP.NET, you’re likely choosing a Microsoft server to run it on. Let me break it down for you:

“Stop being an elitist dork,” you say. “For most applications, the ASP.NET controls are so easy to use, it’s worth paying.” Fair enough. But if you like the building-blocks approach, try JavaServer Faces. JSF components are nearly identical to ASP.NET, but you can run Java on any (read: free) server.

So there you have it. If you like money, don’t use ASP.NET. If you like to program, don’t use ASP.NET.

I know, I know, Microsoft has great tech support. In fact, experts agree that Microsoft’s main advantage over an Open Source solution is that a monkey can maintain it. But listen – programmers and sysadmins should not need tech support. In Russia, programmer and sysadmin tech support YOU. In conclusion, proletarians unite and say “NET!” to ASP.NET.