.NET has the best documentation you are going to find in any platform. It's commercial and presumably a bunch of people were paid actual money to make sure the documentation was correct and complete. For the most part, I find that to be true. In some cases it can't compete with a community-driven doc site like PHP has. Then again, a lot of the user comments for PHP address shortcomings in PHP itself. You don't have that problem with .NET.
.NET is also one of the most complete platforms you will find. Whatever your objective, .NET undoubtedly has some kind of supporting library for it. This support runs the gambit from RS-232 communication to SOAP and XML parsing.
.NET's completeness also leads to a pretty serious disadvantage: its very completeness leads to a deeply-nested structure where almost everything you need is buried and hard to find. You have to learn to think like Microsoft did when they designed the thing. Contrast that to PHP and Ruby on Rails which have a very flat structure. Almost everything you need is within 1 or 2 levels deep and the documentation reflects it. .NET is more like 7 levels deep. That makes .NET optimized for nothing, and that's a problem to me.
Finally, .NET is compiled. It wants to be compiled. It needs to be compiled. That makes deployment a mess because you can't just hop onto the server and 'tweak' something. If you are someone who thinks this is a positive feature, then feel free to move this to the pro side. There are plenty of other benefits of a compiled language (like type checking).
Classic ASP is dead for new projects. I don't recommend starting anything in it, but many companies have existing applications written in Classic ASP. Classic ASP is probably among the worst options when it comes to modern design principles.
Overall, I give the Microsoft stack a thumbs down for the types of applications I frequently build. Even so-called Microsoft Shops would benefit from considering something that more directly addresses the application space and marketplace they are targeting. The exception might be if they have a large investment in essential business libraries and for whatever reason can't expose those as web services.
1 response so far ↓
1 phil
Have:
1. a downloadable karaoke player made in 2001 .net with special graphics librarys which are no longer available for updates.
2. it currently works with an asp.net storefront, has a feel similar to itunes
3. we have a wonderful digital rights management app (asp)which
Needs:
It needs *a little SOAP linking code to make it work with a C driven storefront/cart which will give it a broader use base.
4. The downloadable player needs updating to MS7 because whomever downloads it now has to go through the agony of waiting for a .Net service pack to make sure the app will play on their machine. (Though it works fine when done)
Problem is the graphics aren’t willing to make the recompile to MS7 and it looks like crap when done.
Handle:
1. Either incorporate all the updates for the player into our installer or fix the graphics so they’ll make the jump to 7
2. Write the code to activate the DRM and make it work with C as well as ASP
can you do these?
Leave a Comment