Spacehamster’s Blog

About 9 months ago our Department had a meeting to determine which technology platform we were going to use for future development projects. We’d been focusing on Java and JSP. Until one of our co-workers demonstrated Visual Studio 2003 and the new .NET components. Needless to say, after years of JSP and Classic ASP, everyone was pretty impressed. Instead of laboriously hand-coding a textbox for fifteen minutes, you can drag-and-drop a textbox control in a second. What’s not to like?

As a result, we’ve started quietly developing new projects in the .NET platform. After two months, I’ve got to admit I’m pretty impressed by what I’ve seen thus far. I would estimate that 75% of the activities you previously had to manually code in ASP Classic can be done using web controls. For instance, database-based transactions were a nightmare to code in ASP Classic. In ASP.NET 2.0 you only need the SQLDataSource control. Another pain was customising the appearance of multiple webpages, which is easily done using Master Pages.

The only disadvantage I can see thus far is the fact that it’s proprietary software, and therefore costly to implement. But it’s a necessary tradeoff when you consider the shortened development time. Unless you’ve got a bias against Microsoft, I’d definitely recommend .NET for web-based development. IMHO, it’s the only decent thing Microsoft have successfully produced over the past 5 years.