Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to see MS trying new (or old) things. The lack of back-to-basics simpler approach to doing web development has been a major misstep for them the last decade.

As Rob mentions, ASP.NET WebForms needs to go. It's always a bad choice and it makes it confusing to a lot of developers which of the 3 official MS frameworks they should pick. Dump WebForms and adopt 1 framework for simple stuff (WebMatrix) and 1 for more complex stuff (ASP.NET MVC).

They are also behind by half a decade when it comes to hosting. ec2 is the only thing keeping them in it, and that's at a cost. Even some of the recent hosting initiatives (AppHarbor, EpicWinHosting) are, at best, going to take years to catch up. This is especially true when you take SQL Server into account (SQL Express sucks, deal with it).

WebMatrix is a step in the right direction, but they need to address their messaging, increase their focus, and resolve the hosting gap.

No, Web forms don't need to go (and obviously they won't). When you do POST intensive apps they are much better than MVC.

You would be wrong about that. Consider that with MVC you don't have the entire, massive Page Lifecycle thing and a control tree to parse and walk through (decrypting ViewState, assigning control values, and so on). MVC is actually faster than ASP.NET WebForms.

But it's faster in pico seconds (meaning it's immeasurably faster) and if you're worried on that level - you're doin it wrong :).

If I had to pick between the two, I'd actually toss out MVC. I've used both, and I've seen the results (and horror) of people doing the "Teach yourself ASP.NET in 21 days" version of ASP.NET, but really the stuff in those books isn't the stuff you should be using.

ASP.NET done right actually feels a lot more MVC than ASP.NET MVC. You can still route whatever paths you want, but you get to use actual files where files make sense. And you get to sanely base your pages on a common class, and you can manipulate properties on your HTML from the backend. It's the best of both, really, since all the fun stuff from MVC got poured into ASP.NET too.

I still do MVC work for clients, but as of now, new project stuff where I'm spending my own time (and therefore money) still gets done in regular old ASP.NET.

Hosting isn't really an issue. I've been running a .NET site on Softsys' VPS hosting for a while now, which has features and pricing comparable to something like Linode.

If you outgrow that level of hosting, go Azure or colo your own machines.

Azure seems like a Good Enough(TM) platform for hobby apps

Not sure if that was ment to be a joke - but it's pretty funny. I wonder if MSFT would agree? :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com