Sunday, April 24, 2005

ASP.NET 2.0 ~ A Winner

Week 1
Well, week one developing with ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 is in the books. So far, I am extremely impressed. It is finally possible to separate code from content; to develop in an object oriented manner on a web application.

Let's face it, developing web applications thus far has looked as much like developing an application, as developing in Apple Basic resembles developing in C#. Up until now, despite the best efforts of ASP, ASP.NET 1.1 and PHP, it has had more to do with scripting that objects.

With the aforementioned languages, it was most definitely possible to create robust web applications and even to do it in an object oriented manner, but when you got down to the brass tax it was still a scripted language.

I have been coding for 15+ years and I can tell you it has been exciting to watch the emergence of each one of the languages I have learned. I like many developers enjoy learning new languages, especially languages that allow you write elegant code. Of course, elegance is in the eye of the beholder but the language must still allow it.

ASP.NET has all but bridged that gap between writing a Windows Forms application and a Web Application. Extensive event handling, rich UI elements, a strong security model, great database connectivity, Master Pages for consistency, and the new adaptive rendering model guarantee ASP.NET's opponents will reconsider using this formidable platform.

I should mention, that the .NET Framework 2.0 (Whidbey) in generally is as vastly improved as ASP.NET is in this release. I am impressed with the changes made to this wonderful language. I know that many developers are not happy with some of the new coding semantics introduced by generics and some of the other changes. To those persons, obviously more C# developers thought the benefits outweighed any akwardness related to familiarizing oneself with these new constructs.

To the C# team, great job!

1 comment:

Seth Webster said...

Thanks a lot Martha!