Jul
8
ASP.NET: Is WebForms too uncool for school?
I’ve recently read Aaron’s great blog post on why .NET has had a very poor uptake in the startup arena, and is seen primarily as an enterprise commodity. Aaron, in my opinion, correctly states that it’s the .NET development community itself, with it’s lean towards developing interoperability of business systems and legacy systems, that keeps .NET from ever being used outside of the large corporate castle.
If you’ve ready any portion of my blog or had a look at my Twitter feed, you’ll know I’m a C# guy. Not that I’m a Microsoft fanboy - I fell into using it because, surprise surprise, a large corporate that I was working at used it. Having said that, I really enjoy using C# and in general the whole .NET framework - I actually use it on my home Ubuntu laptop using the Mono framework and MonoDevelop.
Just as Aaron says in his post, I too am a natural entrepreneur - I’ve currently got one big idea in the pipeline revolving around a hybrid of realtime communication, online forums and interconnected streams of related data (I really need to work on that pitch), as well as some smaller dog food apps for day to day development. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll have the time to grind out all the code I need to get things released. The thing is, everything I’m developing is in C#. I could follow trend and go all RoR/PHP/Python etc., but that means eating into development time by having to learn new stuff. Okay, so I’m actually in a full time role so it’s not like mission critical to get a product up and running in order to put food on the table, but 3 months of coming up to speed with a new language is 3 months of not writing production worthy code. Joel Spolsky’s post from a few years back gives a great insight into this.
Back to my main point, all of my core web-facing development is done using ASP.NET MVC. As far as C# and .NET is concerned, this is the forefront of being a web darling. It’s new. It’s shiny. It’s fast. It works well in teams. It works well for a lone developer. It structures your code base. It’s in bed with jQuery. It promotes the use of everything else that’s new and shiny from the Microsoft sweet shop.
WebForms is perceived as old school, with an emphasis on the “old”. Looking at my company’s two software family trees - one WebForms, the other new developments MVC - they couldn’t be further detached.
The WebForms software is slow and clunky, full of redundant code, huge amounts of custom and 3rd party controls, different data and business layers for doing the same thing.
Conversely, the MVC lineage is easy to navigate, easy to understand, elegant in it’s implementation, is standard and consistent.
Okay, so it could be argued that the developers that have worked on the projects are to blame/praise for the quality of the code, which is fair, but I think a bigger reason is cultural. WebForms is seen as the old guard. Old, boring WebForms. Why bother with it? MVC on the other hand is a spritely, playful minx, allowing .NET developers to join the same ballpark as the new media boys. Hurrah!
So what next? When it comes to developing startup/community applications, I would have used .NET/C# anyway, purely because that’s where my skillset is best suited. Any applications released for consumption on the web would have been in WebForms. But now MVC is on the block and is becoming proven in the field, are the days of the old guard numbered, and are we going to see a bigger uptake of non-enterprise developers coming over to the Microsoft development house?
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