.NET Fear and Opportunity

[Brett_Tabke]

[software.silicon.com...]

All of the firms surveyed said they were looking to deploy .Net but more than three-quarters (76 per cent) said their plans are being hampered by a lack of relevant expertise.

[bcolflesh]

Time to download the free developer betas:

[lab.msdn.microsoft.com...]

[korkus2000]

The complaints are very familiar here. I hear the same from people learning .Net. Since it is a new way of creating software it is hard for people to get their heads around it. It scares off ASP and COM developers.

I see a lot of companies afriad to go full .Net since there is not many skilled .net developers yet. We should remember though that it has only really been out of beta for a little over a year.

[blaze]

C# .NET *rocks*. It's like all the promises that Java made .. but they actually come true (well, except for the security .. )

Too bad deployment is such a bugger.

[jonathanleger]

Yay for me! I'm a full-time .NET developer... maybe I should ask for a raise. ;)

[Easy_Coder]

I forced myself to make the switch to c# .net over 2 years ago and I'm not looking back...

[CritterNYC]

Anybody else get nervous about depending on Microsoft to generate your HTML and Javascript for you? Between that and the deployment setup compared to ASP, I decided to pass on ASP.NET, at least for now.

[walshy]

I'm about to start redeveloping our corporate Intranet which should be the ideal place to trial ASP.NET and get it sorted out before looking at our external web sites.

I've been to 2 courses but am still not convinced by ASP.NET. It seems overly complex to develop & deploy. ASP is doing the job fine - I'm not developing 'rocket science' on our sites - I just can't bring myself to move to ASP.NET at the moment other than trying out something new.

That said, making the hard decision now could be looked back on in 18 months time as the right way to go.

Interested in everyone elses thoughts too.

[duckhunter]

maybe I should ask for a raise

Ya! :)

In the past with VBScript it's been easy for the novice to scrap around and build websites with database functionality. You can't just fiddle around with .NET and learn quickly. Classes, books and lots of trial and error before you have a polished application.

These companies have been paying college grads to produce COM and ASP with SQL Backends. To make .NET tick, it takes some serious Architecture and planning. If you try to piecemeal your application, that's exactly what you will end up with, a bunch of one-offs that can't inter-operate. Plan and build it right and oh my, it's almost like magic the way some of it clicks. And since we all know it's about "the date", what are you going to expect?

Either way, looks like there's some mulla stepping up to the table.

[Xoc]

I'm an instructor for .NET. For the last two years, I have been teaching a small number of classes. Companies had slashed their training budgets to nothing in the economic downturn. But just in the last two months, I've been doing more .NET training than I can handle.

ASP.NET using C# is the hot market right now.

[raywood]

There are plenty of opinions. Mine is that making really functional websites, sites that do cool things with database back-ends, is much easier with .NET than it was with VBScript. Debugging VBScript is a real pain. .NET with Visual Studio provides much better debugging capability.

If you can grasp OOP then you'll like .NET. Thousands of built-in classes, inheritance, and user controls make it very flexible. I don't know about it taking over the world, but it works for me, and I'm sticking with it for the time being.

[ddogg]

.NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I couldn't even imagine having to program in old ASP anymore, ugh.

If you are a Microsoft developer and are not currently an expert in .NET, you've better become one ASAP or you will be finding yourself out of a job. Don't let technology pass you by..

[Easy_Coder]

ddogg is right... microsoft isn't going to support asp for ever either. They'll sunset it at somepoint and when they do you don't want to be standing there wondering if that's a good time to get on the .net bandwagon because you'll be 4-5 years behind the curve.

[edited by: Xoc at 2:27 am (utc) on July 6, 2004]

[Xoc]

Microsoft is unlikely to completely abandon classic ASP. However, it is unlikely that there will be any enhancements to the language, environment, or development tools.

[edited by: Xoc at 2:27 am (utc) on July 6, 2004]

[Jack_Hughes]

I tried the second .NET beta a few years ago and was rather disappointed. Microsoft still seem to think of themselves as a consumer company rather than an enterprise company. I can't believe that either Sun or IBM would have released .NET so early in its evolution.