vsbabu.org

First thoughts on ASP.NET

Read a little bit more about .Net and ASP.NET. Downloaded the free IDE Web Matrix on my XP Home machine and played with it. Very good. No need to have IIS installed. I’ve mixed feelings about ASP.NET now.

The Good

• Makes building web forms very easy.
• Makes it very similar to standard GUI form building.
• Similar to ASP, it supports multiple languages.
• Atleast this IDE makes XHTML code by default.
• Component based page assembly. In the hands of proper software engineers, this can be a really good thing.
• I think it does a decent enough job of making it possible to separate pieces of a solution.

The Bad

• The final HTML generated is completely at the mercy of Microsoft. Will this cause future applications producing web pages that IE alone can parse? I’m not kidding - see MS Exchange’s Outlook Web Access interface.
• Component based page assembly. I still like to have fine control over the HTML my application generates.
• Can I run this on Apache? May be when Mono project gets going in full swing.
• I still don’t think it provides the kind of extensible framework Zope provides.
• Like ZPT+Python Scripts in Zope, it does not *force* you to have a clean separation of code and content. May be we can have a ZPT.Net version?

What will make .Net great?

Does .Net support subscription services for components? If it does, in addition to current framework, I think that will make .Net the dominant technology in 3 years - assuming North Korea and Iraq adventures don’t completely tank the economy.

If third party developers can easily develop controls (web or rich) and services that can be hosted on the web, and using a standard interface, can get paid for usage on a subscription basis, that might be the biggest boost the whole developer community needs. For example, let us say I’ve a component for rich editing of HTML files. I register it with Microsoft, may be pay them some money to get it ranked high, publish the interfaces and for a monthly fee per user, make it available to be included in other applications developed by others. May be someone else will read my interface definition and make a better component implementing the same interface. Perhaps this can allow my customer to switch to the new service provider.

These kind of real-time, needs-based subscription is a real boon for individual third party developers which is lot better for a stable IT economy. Software publishing should be as easy and competitive as writing a blog.

However, I will be really happy, if all this happens and there is a choice on CLI’s. Not only Microsoft’s, but Mono, dotGnu.net etc.