PHP or ASP.net: Did I Do The Right Thing?

I had a background of Unix and Windows NT. I did both ASP.Net and PHP and switched back and forth between contracts for about 6 years depending on who offered the most cash. I now sit at a Microsoft consultancy, on a Mac, doing all the high level technical design work and Unix bits the company needs (and occasionally digging the company out of the crap when they screw stuff up and the normal staff don't know what to do and Googling it is beyond them).

Did I do the right thing? No. I should have skipped Microsoft stack entirely. I say this after 12 years of .Net and a previous 6 years of COM/C++/Win32. It has been the universally most stressful platform to work on. The technology is terribly complicated, obtuse and non-orthogonal and full of dead-ends and surprises. It's also virtually impossible to cleanly automate anything which means you need thousands of hands to push the buttons in the right order[1]. However this pales in comparison to the culture which almost universally (90%+ of outfits I've worked at) contains solely grim factory farm programmers who don't actually care what they are doing or understand what happens outside the ecosystem and outsourcers who whilst technically superior to the on-site staff, march around with loaded guns ready to shoot their own toes off (and anyone else dancing with them).

The only good bit was the cash.

I'd rather have picked up a 2003 OsCommerce site than do it again.

Now I'm learning Objective C and Cocoa to solve a few real world problems in another non-technology market that IT rarely penetrates. I'm doing that on my own.

[1] This has finally improved, but a little too late with PS and PS DSC for example.

I don't understand the premise of this article. The OP made one technology specialization choice 13 years ago, and all he wonders is whether it was the right one?

I know little about the author so I can't really judge, but shouldn't the question have been "what if I had learned something new and very different every year, instead of every 13"?

Honestly, if your thirteen year old technology choices are still having an impact today, then you're doing the wrong thing regardless.

I started out with PHP, got whatever job I could which involved Access and VBA, then VB.NET, then C#... now I use JavaScript, Python and occasionally Ruby.

That isn't to say that you should know six different languages. But you should know programming well enough that you can apply your skills wherever you need to.

Watching the things the ASP.NET team has accomplished inside such a politically poisoned organization as Microsoft over the last few years has been inspiring. I don't know how they managed to get things like "out of band" updates, open sourcing MVC, and so on accomplished in that environment. Makes me think there is hope for getting some similar changes through in my current "enterprise" environment.

At my last job, we migrated from classic ASP to ASP.NET MVC, but we pretty much just left out all the horrible parts of ASP.NET (which there are, of course, many).

Basically if you nix webforms and .aspx files, and do your own templating (so essentially, just use ASP.NET for routing and controllers), it's not awful. Visual Studio is nice and C# is surprisingly decent as a webdev language. But yeah. I'd much rather use Python or Ruby.

I have been working on the MS stack for more than 14 years and still remember the decision I made to invest in learning the .NET platform. I certainly don’t regret my decision and maybe in hindsight I would have made some different choices along the way but being a .NET developer pays my bills and gives me plenty of satisfaction. For the last two years I've been doing more with the big three (JS, CSS3, HTML5) and I’m keeping my eyes on SignalR, Web and Mobile Development, AngularJS, and other "cool" technologies, but .NET is still paying my bills and I have no problem with that.

Why not do both? I did C/C++, then C#, and now C# plus PHP, JavaScript, or whatever is needed for the job. Sure it takes some ramp up, but not that much.

I wasn't a fan of the MS Web stack for a long time. ASP.NET MVC fixed that. It's still overly complicated but it gets better with each release.

From a language standpoint, it's night and day. C# is a real programming language. You can use it to write web apps, desktop apps, mobile apps, daemons/services--even embedded apps. PHP is a templating tool that has tried to evolve into a language and has been hampered in the process by horrible legacy. It's actually pretty decent now but it is still only useful for one thing: web apps.

I had to make this exact same decision in 2001 and I chose PHP!

I subsequently fell in love with Python and am still active with it today. I think a choice as far back as 2001 doesn't matter too much, programming is programming. However, I feel like I became a better programmer by having to deal with a language as shitty as PHP. There were so many pitfalls that I quickly became an expert at working around them -- this took a lot of painstaking investigation into the inner workings of the language.

>the Microsoft web world was (and to a large degree still is) all about "Visual Component Development". What that means is you basically do a lot of drag and drop

If were doing it wrong, then maybe. Allowing "VB6" programmers to drag-n-drop stuff to make forms is still a fine way for them to make applications that run on a high-speed connection and just happen to be using HTML by accident. Being able to use a "datasource" was apparently valuable for some people, although I could never get it to work well.

Was it a bad idea to only focus on that and force the control model on everyone? Sure. It wasn't necessarily a terrible option for a lot of people. I did demos of ASP.NET to PHP developers, and some of them were pretty blown away by the idea of having events fire and being able to do something like "foo.BackgroundColor = bla" and have the whole page "just work".

But being forced into the control model with viewstate and all that, it certainly didn't make ASP.NET competitive with other technologies for having total control over the experience.

Had MS gone "MVC" from the start and focused only one web techologies, and had someone else made the easy "forms for the web" toolkit and got marketshare, we'd be saying how foolish MS was for not providing a similar toolkit.

I had the same reaction to ASP.NET 1.0. "Do they have to make this thing so damn hard?" I had a PO system to write, and didn't have the time to fart around with bloated datagrid components and reams of cumbersome XML.

I had the luxury of being a 1-man IT department, so I gave up and learned Zope, which led me to Python, and then Django. Had ASP.NET MVC existed at the time, no doubt I would still be writing code in C#. In retrospect, I'm so glad it didn't.

i was about 16 or 17, and I sat in front of my freshly reformatted computer with a copy of windows NT4 and the latest version of slackware at the time. I was going to do a full partition install of one or the other ...

Even at the time I realized it was a crossroads. My entire career and future pretty much grew organically from that point outwards. I don't think I would have had even remotely the opportunities had I not committed myself to open source.

Rob did some interesting and influential things in the .NET community which stems from exactly what he wrote about: his work with Ruby and Rails.

I've come from the Microsoft (Windows 32-bit API) to .NET Fx to Linux/Unix world in much the same way as Rob; ASP.NET to Rails.

There is a certain reality I have learned over the years: when I consult part time and don't mind sometimes boring work I earn twice as much writing C# than Ruby. The money is in the enterprise.

Of course at my day job I write Scala and figure out ways to get the most amount of Ruby [or sometimes Python] I possibly can into our day to day work. I love optimizing for productivity and happiness.

I read the whole blog post disagreeing with almost everything right up until the end when I read:

"This is the one shining negative here: .NET stunted my knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript."

This is the whole point of the blog post. And this is in fact true. But terminology that is not pointed out is that ASP.NET WEBFORMS are what "stunted" your knowledge. WebForms made developers oblivious of how the web actually works. .NET, C#, or VB.NET isn't the problem.

Also, living in a Microsoft world can be insulating, but only if you aren't looking for a better way. "Alt.NET" was really a belief in outside the box thinking.

Javascript frameworks are going a long way to eliminate some of the worst parts of .NET development. The ability to design c# as a service and use api calls as hooks to the back end has helped act as a catalyst for change.

Ermm. Neither. Honestly I prefer C# over PHP. Decent open solutions over C#.

A response to this post from another asp.net developer: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2014/02/19/155486...

"...early on in my MVP/Community days (2007ish). Microsoft hired some non-traditional devs to head up something in the ASP.NET group. Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery all came on board and launched ASP.NET MVC which BLEW. ASP.NET. UP."

First, asking yourself if you did the right thing is silly, you made the best decision with the information you had at the time. To be honest, technology ebbs and flows. What's hot right now may not be hot in the future. I think the key skill is learning how to learn, so you can learn a new technology quickly. Also, don't just focus on technology, understanding how a business operates is just as important!

If I had dedicated more time and energy to learning new things 13 years ago would I know more things now?

Yes?

If you're going enterprise, go C#.

If you're going open source, you should have went python or node.

I hate that annoying nav menu, is too big.