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Bluefrog wrote: Again, it depends on your environment. For DNN (an ASP.NET portal application), installing modules (similar to a script) requires almost zero brain activity. It's just that easy.

ASP.NET 2.0 is easier to program with than 1.x. You can do things in one line that would have taken half a dozen lines in 1.x

That's both a blessing and a curse though. Any time a bunch of functionality gets encapsulated into one function, it becomes harder to modify one piece of it as it's masked by the uber-function.

The biggest limitation on .net 2.0 deployment in shared hosting environments is currently psoft's Hsphere control panel which can support either 2.0 or 1.x for an account, but not both for the same account.

There are ways for the server admin to manually configure a domain to use a version other than the hsphere default for the server but if you loose the server, all that manual configuration has to be redone. Not a problem if you only have a couple of sites that are not the servers .net standard, but a different matter if there are hundreds on the server.

The corporate world tends to avoid scripting languages for public web sites. The main problem there is the run-time execution of script code which is hundreds of times slower than compiled machine code (or in the case of .net, Common Language Runtime.

I think it's useful to remember that .net is a framework, not a language. As a framework it is extensible beyond it's initial capabilities. ASP has a half-dozen or so objects, .net has well over 2000 built in - not counting extensions to the framework. That's an uncomfortable position to be in for people who are used to knowing a language inside-out.

The closest paradigm we have for .net development is the java framework where functionality is also organized by libraries. There's a core set of libraries that everyone should be familiar with and then there's additional libraries that you only get involved with for specific types of system services - e.g. JMS = Java Message Services library, JDBC = Java Data Base Connectivity, etc. It's not uncommon to see a bunch of acronyms behind an add for a java developer - those acronyms specify the libraries you need to be familiar with.

Where Microsoft has fallen on it's ass is in mapping the .net libraries to types of systems. In an object-oriented world, there are 22 system "design patterns". All systems/subsystems will fall into one of those patterns.

The java community has done a good job of mapping those design patterns to libraries and applications. So If I want to build a web-based application that does X, I can find out that YY design pattern is probably the most useful and it will involve ZZZ libraries.

Microsoft depended upon the community to explore the language and develop the library mappings to design patterns and applications but it hasn’t happened beyond a limited scale for a variety of reasons. Microsoft has started to step up to the mapping plate but in a back-assward manner.

So the bottom line is that you don't need to know everything about .net beyond understanding a few framework concepts and what a couple of libraries can do for you. That'll give you the ability to explore or use other libraries on an as-needed basis. The capabilities of the .net framework are going to grow and the body-of-thought for how to use it is also advancing. The longer you put it off, the further behind you'll be when you do make the jump.

PHP is a respectable language with some limitations, after JAVA/JSP, it's probably the best language for UNIX apps. Java however is a poor choice for shared web hosting due to limitations of the virtual machines needed to run it in. Object PHP however is still something of a joke. I don't see the larger conceptual image of how it all fits together that .net and java have used as their guide - but admittedly, I haven't looked that closely at it.

Edited by dpyers - 13 April 2006 at 2:08pm

Good points.  I may eventually try ASP.NET now that I have enough knowledge of programming.  But the novice will probably stick with simpler things until they get up to par, like I did.  Started with HTML, then MivaScript, then ASP, then PHP, and now might even try some ASP.NET for new websites (not existing ones).

I can see people going from HTML to ASP/PHP to ASP.NET, but I don't see the casual webmaster jumping directly to ASP.NET unless they are interested in becoming a programmer.

What I see MS doing is creating a very wild language that offers insane amounts of power (PHP cannot compete with .NET there) and then offering the TOOLS to do something with it. They aren't there quite yet, but I'm sure that .NET 3 will absolutely kill anything else out there. But, that's contingent on the TOOLS that are available.

People don't want to create code... They want to DO things. And ASP.NET is  making (will make) real power accessible to normal people the way that CoffeeCup HTML editor made making web pages accessible to your mom.

MS is about "getting things DONE".

UNIX is about "it had better f**king work no matter how much it costs..."

Linux is about "I'm a cheap bastard and won't pay for software."

Mac is about "I just want to send email and surf."

Personally, I just want to get stuff done. The MS model works for me.

I do not need to run systems with 99.9999999999999% uptime distributed over 10,000 servers.  If I needed that, I'd look at UNIX (Sun, HP, IBM), not Linux or Windows.

The problem is a question of scale. UNIX for a simple pure static HTML web site is like using nukes on mosquitoes.

For seriously intense applications, Cray is one to look at. But we're not concerned with that kind of stuff here.

And the reflection looks nice too in the logo.