Web != Windows Forms

Many who work with ASP.NET have issues with it in some way – and eventually write a blog post sharing their annoyances with the framework. These blog posts are littered throughout the internet. This post is my submittal to the fray; although I’m not the first to point out the issue I have a gripe with.

I appreciate innovation, and there is plenty of it in the .NET framework. In many ways it is a joy to work with. Classes are intuitively named, it is very performant, and it is clear that Microsoft really does value developers in its .NET ecosystem.

But for ASP.NET, it seems Microsoft tried to port its method for creating desktop applications to the Web; in many ways pretends the Web does not exist. One example: mangling of markup in forms and validation. This may not matter for a desktop app, but for Web it’s pretty annoying.

Over time methods of development and frameworks have reduced this aspect of framework – I’m looking at you, Castle Project and ASP.NET MVC – but still, a Web page is not a Windows form.

Despite my gripe, the ASP.NET portion of the framework still has plenty of good features to be happy about. I just with they would have got that other part right.