6 ms·

Not all of ASP.NET though...notably absent: Web Forms.

by githulhu 12y ago

gagege 12y ago
Yeah, I noticed that too. It would seem that my co-worker who thinks MVC is a fad is at odds with MS themselves.
- chiph 12y ago
  ASP.NET MVC is no longer a fad - a lot of the job openings I'm seeing are asking for it.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    ASP MVC stopped being a fad years ago.
  - dested 12y ago
    Id say its safe to say webforms is dead. The only job openings for it now are legacy systems.
    - byte1918 12y ago
      SharePoint and there are probably others.
    - gagege 12y ago
      That's what I'm trying to tell this senior developer at work. It's a pain.
      - chris_mahan 12y ago
        In my case, my direct manager. Oh, and not ASP.Net webforms. WinForms, for desktop-deployed software.
eftpotrm 12y ago
Trust me; that's a good thing. Nasty, deeply misguided platform - whoever came up with the idea of PostBack and trying to make the web look like VB6 is definitely not on my Christmas card list. Ties you in knots trying to make the web something it fundamentally isn't. I'll be quiet now, and get back to working on my MVC code. The day when I can finally stop having to work on WebForms code too will be a happy one :-)
- githulhu 12y ago
  You can't fault it for what it tried to be, though - a plug-and-play, drag-and-drop toolset designed to make web development accessible to savvy end-users and inexperienced developers, at least for what consitutes perhaps 80% of most businesses' needs - simple CRUD apps. I think there's a lot of value in that, and for as much frustration as maintaining Web Forms apps has caused me (and will continue to cause me) I think it would be neat if they open-sourced it...what's to be lost if the alternative is to just let it rot into obscurity? I would totally fork the repo.
- graycat 12y ago
  Not a rhetorical question: What's so wrong with Web Forms? Postback? That's really part of HTTP. What the browsers send back to the server is as specified by HTTP, not Microsoft or Web Forms. Viewstate? Okay, it's a bit of a tricky thing, but really can mostly ignore it. Else it provides a somewhat useful service. Controls? Yes, for each HTML 'control', there is an ASP.NET class so to send the HTML for the control to the user, get an instance of the class corresponding to the control, assign values to the properties, attach the instance to a big tree that gets walked by the code in one of the ASP.NET 'events', maybe PAGE_PRERENDER, and move along. Why is this so bad? Web Forms is my first and so far only way I've written Web pages. Explain what is wrong with Web Forms and what is much better and why?
  - cwbrandsma 12y ago
    The real issue is the amount of "Black Box" in WebForms. A lot of the guidance is "Do it this way". Why? "Because". You really can't know what is going on behind the scenes. ViewState and the PostBack model are both parts of that. I used them for years...never knew how they worked or what was going on to make them work. This in turn forced people to go to the MVP pattern to manage those systems, but I still find plenty of clients with code behind that is THOUSANDS of lines long. Everything in one file. Also, many of the controls were very hard to style, with some very strange html in there.

Not all of ASP.NET though...notably absent: Web Forms.

gagege 12y ago

Yeah, I noticed that too. It would seem that my co-worker who thinks MVC is a fad is at odds with MS themselves.

chiph 12y ago
ASP.NET MVC is no longer a fad - a lot of the job openings I'm seeing are asking for it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  ASP MVC stopped being a fad years ago.
- dested 12y ago
  Id say its safe to say webforms is dead. The only job openings for it now are legacy systems.
  - byte1918 12y ago
    SharePoint and there are probably others.
  - gagege 12y ago
    That's what I'm trying to tell this senior developer at work. It's a pain.
    - chris_mahan 12y ago
      In my case, my direct manager. Oh, and not ASP.Net webforms. WinForms, for desktop-deployed software.

eftpotrm 12y ago

Trust me; that's a good thing. Nasty, deeply misguided platform - whoever came up with the idea of PostBack and trying to make the web look like VB6 is definitely not on my Christmas card list. Ties you in knots trying to make the web something it fundamentally isn't. I'll be quiet now, and get back to working on my MVC code. The day when I can finally stop having to work on WebForms code too will be a happy one :-)

githulhu 12y ago
You can't fault it for what it tried to be, though - a plug-and-play, drag-and-drop toolset designed to make web development accessible to savvy end-users and inexperienced developers, at least for what consitutes perhaps 80% of most businesses' needs - simple CRUD apps. I think there's a lot of value in that, and for as much frustration as maintaining Web Forms apps has caused me (and will continue to cause me) I think it would be neat if they open-sourced it...what's to be lost if the alternative is to just let it rot into obscurity? I would totally fork the repo.
graycat 12y ago
Not a rhetorical question: What's so wrong with Web Forms? Postback? That's really part of HTTP. What the browsers send back to the server is as specified by HTTP, not Microsoft or Web Forms. Viewstate? Okay, it's a bit of a tricky thing, but really can mostly ignore it. Else it provides a somewhat useful service. Controls? Yes, for each HTML 'control', there is an ASP.NET class so to send the HTML for the control to the user, get an instance of the class corresponding to the control, assign values to the properties, attach the instance to a big tree that gets walked by the code in one of the ASP.NET 'events', maybe PAGE_PRERENDER, and move along. Why is this so bad? Web Forms is my first and so far only way I've written Web pages. Explain what is wrong with Web Forms and what is much better and why?
- cwbrandsma 12y ago
  The real issue is the amount of "Black Box" in WebForms. A lot of the guidance is "Do it this way". Why? "Because". You really can't know what is going on behind the scenes. ViewState and the PostBack model are both parts of that. I used them for years...never knew how they worked or what was going on to make them work. This in turn forced people to go to the MVP pattern to manage those systems, but I still find plenty of clients with code behind that is THOUSANDS of lines long. Everything in one file. Also, many of the controls were very hard to style, with some very strange html in there.