What do people think of ASP.NET 2.0?

[HankWangford]

microsoft ajax framework

very 'black box' in too many areas. profile handling is appalling. sacrifices best practise on the alter of ease of use. library refactoring and enhancements seem ok. and again, it seems that you need to step outside the preferred ms way to get performant apps. incredible after .net 1 that web apps were not released with the initial release of vs 2005. it will be interesting to see the atlas/ajax library support in sp1.

already have decent web 2.0 support for ajax etc in the shape of rico and dojo, dont need to wait for the drag n drop buggy ms bloated clientside offering

[TheMonkey]

My take:

- VS.Net 2005 is pretty buggy, especially doing multi-threaded stuff.
- Master pages are cool.
- Generics are cool.
- Nullable types are bad.
- Built in unit testing is rubbish. Back to NUnit for me.
- You still need ReSharper to get decent refactoring.
- My MVC framework (better than ASP.Net!) still works!
- Membership is rubbish.
- they've added a lot of "for dummies" things like the web parts and data source controls.
- Still distinctly pushes 2-tier client-server development.
- Deployment is rubbish (I just use MSBuild and SVN to deploy actually bypassing that totally!)
- Visual SourceSafe 2005 is even MORE pathetic. Stick with SVN.
- Needed to buy more RAM for the dev boxes.
- Postbacks still don't work with Akamai edge caches so back to my MVC framework.
- UI really is clunky on machines with Nvidia nView.

I'm slowly losing faith in it. I've been renewing my interest in good old fashioned C recently.

[quickweb]

AtW:
"C# 2.0 and CLR in general are solid things, used ASP very little - intuitely disliked it all the time" - agree. Always reminded me too much of 'webcontrols'. viewstate, postback etc, I've seen abused too often.

scotspine:
"it seems that you need to step outside the preferred ms way to get performant apps" - agree. While MS come up with some nifty stuff at times, the promoted world view (by other teams?) of how you're meant to do everything is sometimes to be ignored.

Thak God someone has given me a bit of faith. Went (and didn't get) for an interview last week, which included a technical test and discussion and seemed hell-bent on doing everything The Way You're Supposed To (as described by MS).

I'm sure, like others here who use .Net for real projects rather than demonstrations of particular features, you have you own company/team/personal frameworks etc. to avoid some of the nannying from the ASP sepcific controls?

[AtW]

you have you own company/team/personal frameworks etc. to avoid some of the nannying from the ASP sepcific controls?

Yes - you can't beat stuff that was done for yourself: faster, smaller, better.

Thanks God at least the core of C#/CLR are good! Thanks for this go to Borland rather than Microsoft though.

[Joe Black]

- Nullable types are bad.

Hey, I like the idea of nullable types.

[DimPrawn]

Another "great" ASP.NET 2.0 feature. Url mapping (or Url rewriting as it's also known).

Now you can stick your url maps in the web.config

<system.web>
    <urlMappings enabled="true">
        <add url="~/Widget/aspx" mappedUrl="~/Products/W/Widgets.aspx"/>
    </arlMappings>
</system.web> 

Except they have to be hard coded and are purely static (no wildcards) and don't support Regular Expressions rendering this solution absolutely useless and pointless.

The more I use VS.NET 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 the more I'm coming to the conclusion that most of the "cool" new features were added purely to please MS management in quick "look, no code" demos.

What a missed opportunity for productive web development and what an incentive to start looking at Ruby on Rails or LAMP or some other platform it will be for many developers.

[AtW]

It was like this: a good team headhunted from Borland designed CLR and C#: it is the kind of extremely good talented people that Microsoft has got among its tens of thousands of employees and contractors *cough* DimPrawn *cough*

ASP.NET, ADO.NET and other crap was added by 2nd rate quality - they are just not as good as the core team and it shows.

What really pisses me off is that they now called .NET 2.0 + Vista specific libraries as .NET 3.0, bastards - C# 3.0 is actually fking awesome but it looks like they decided to skip it for release past next!!!

For pure Web Dev it is really PHP + MySQL + Apache + Linux: far more productive, cheaper than .NET. C# is good for serious big app work, not short web stuff, so ASP.NET is a gimmick really just to keep existing userbase from migrating.

To be fair VS 2005 C# environment is much better than that in VS 2003 - I now know that because I only recently switched to it and had to go back to VS 2003 in the last few days and see how crappy it actually was, I dont talk looks (though syntax highlighting is much better in VS 2005), but also productivity - Intellisense in VS 2005 C# (VB is still sh1te) is much much better - prediction is picking up local vars etc, good stuff really helps!

[TheMonkey]

Another "great" ASP.NET 2.0 feature. Url mapping (or Url rewriting as it's also known).

Now you can stick your url maps in the web.config

<system.web>
    <urlMappings enabled="true">
        <add url="~/Widget/aspx" mappedUrl="~/Products/W/Widgets.aspx"/>
    </arlMappings>
</system.web> 

Except they have to be hard coded and are purely static (no wildcards) and don't support Regular Expressions rendering this solution absolutely useless and pointless.

Apart from the fact that it just doesn't work at all with the navigation controls as they are hashed on URL.

Agree with AtW and DimPrawn on web dev. I wouldn't put asp.net near anything purely web. It's just not worth it. I'm actually looking at using a dedicated Apache module with distributed shared memory for the current bit of kit i'm working on. .Net just doesn't scale enough!!!

Hey, I like the idea of nullable types.

Kind of turns OO back into a relational model. Sets + nulls = trouble.

[AtW]

.Net just doesn't scale enough!!!

.NET scales just fine - but IIS and ASP.NET might not scale as good as Apache.

These days I only write backend .NET code with GUI being mainly web browser using my own small templating library and mini webserver.

ASP.net is probably okay for something small, but then again if you have something small then just use PHP.

[Joe Black]

Kind of turns OO back into a relational model. Sets + nulls = trouble.

I like the set of none...