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DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 6:23 am
by volomike
For the past 6 years, all my development has been on Linux and PHP. The past two weeks, however, I had a client stuck in a bad situation with no one else on the payroll to turn to with his DotNet problems, so it ended up being me. But first, some background -- I left the Microsoft world of programming for these reasons:

- DotNet and all its complexity came out. I was perfectly happy on the old ASP technology at the time, so this was frustrating. Connecting and retrieving data from the database used to be accomplished in like 8 lines on ASP, and became like 50-60 lines on DotNet (although it was abstracted via a GUI). Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world.
- CodeRed walked right on through MS security and MS had difficulty stopping it.
- The Blaster virus walked right on through -- same troubles with MS in capping that. We even had power outages tied to it although the American power companies denied a connection, but I knew better. I remember CNN reporting the Blaster virus was tied to power outages, and then later the power companies denying that. I wasn't buying it -- sounded like the Government told CNN to not report that as a matter of national security.
- I was tired of paying $2000 every two years for MSDN Universal to keep ahead of the pack in my MS skills.
- I was tired of having to relearn new APIs that were the same as last year's APIs, just renamed -- thanks to Joel Splosky for putting that so aptly.
- All the cool news regarding innovation in development was coming out of the Linux world, and that's still the case today.
- Among all my peers and myself, I was seeing Linux fill the server room and Microsoft IIS was diminishing.
- I saw the video where Bill Gates lied in court in the monopoly hearings.
- I surfed around with Java and JSP on Linux and was pulling my hair out until I learned PHP, instead.
- PHP got really cool in the middle of the PHP4 years and has gotten even cooler since then. Sure, the API is a little inconsistent here or there, but it works.

Therefore, ultimately I said enough is enough and quit Microsoft cold turkey. I switched over to LAMP. I reformatted my laptop with RH8 Linux at the time, and traveled through the Linuxes until I settled on Ubuntu about 4 years ago. Haven't left Ubuntu since.

So, anyway, the heck I have gone through these past few weeks with DotNet has been disturbing. I messed with:

- IIS and DotNet not talking to each other.
- Several undocumented things like the fact that all DotNet libraries after 2.0 do not show up in IIS and so you won't see 3.5 seeming like it's installed when it is.
- Crazy stuff with the web.config file.
- Crazy folder permissions you need to make stuff work.
- Getting a server registry so screwed up when trying things that you have no choice but to reformat and start all over again.
- Application pools having trouble.
- Learning that I need to install AJAX Extensions because of the errors I was having, even though it made no sense.
- Plesk control panel being both a blessing and a curse regarding one's IIS install. Sometimes it's better to start all over again in Plesk and recreate the domain there, then start fixing things about an old website after that. But if you check off the wrong thing in Plesk when creating that domain, your old site might not work.

All I can say is, I'm so happy that my world is now LAMP instead of DotNet. I mean really, what a bunch of crap this DotNet stuff is. Once you learn a few basics about how Linux and Apache works, LAMP is a piece of cake compared to DotNet. It's a miracle that DotNet sites are even accomplished without major delays. I would bet, hands down, that if a company wanted to send out RFPs to a LAMP and DotNet team, the LAMP team could deliver it cheaper, on time, and have less troubleshooting and more stability.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:23 pm
by Doug G
An old saying: 'tis a poor workman who blames his tools'.

This is just another typical anti-MS rant from someone who apparently expects to learn a completely new very complex system in a few minutes.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:53 pm
by Benjamin
Actually, I agree with everything that volomike has said. You can simply compare the lamp vs ms hosting environment statistics and realize that we are not the only ones who feel this way.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 5:56 pm
by Doug G
astions wrote:Actually, I agree with everything that volomike has said. You can simply compare the lamp vs ms hosting environment statistics and realize that we are not the only ones who feel this way.
Oh, you agree? That's nice.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 6:15 pm
by Benjamin
I don't understand what you are trying to imply.
Doug G wrote:An old saying: 'tis a poor workman who blames his tools'.
As a former master builder at a woodmill, I can vouch that quality tools can make a huge difference in the final product, especially when measuring and cutting wood down to tolerances of 64ths of an inch or less.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 10:14 pm
by JAB Creations
ASP

Code: Select all

response.write "clientside text"
PHP

Code: Select all

echo 'clientside text';
Four or fourteen characters? If Microsoft can't even make a simple output command simple...simple made as simple...heh...then I don't even want to imagine what volomike was working with before he quit!

Doug, your quote was applied with the opposite context.

I made the mistake of buying an ASP.NET book and not actually reading the beginning tutorials a few years ago. I brought it home and started reading the basics and realized...oh crap...

Page 43...
<asp:label id-"lblMessage2" font-size-"20pt"
Any one who knows the difference between serverside and clientside code knows just by looking at that code that ASP.NET is total crap. Seriously...I've never seen a PHP function designed to create any (X)HTML output directly...sure you may see people echo out (X)HTML but PHP itself doesn't even think about touching it. But then you look at ASP.NET and it's output is absolutely atrocious!

I'll take volomike's word about the things Microsoft pulls. We all know the nature of Microsoft...and I'm surprised they get even half their stuff working as well as it does (and that's not saying much keep in mind!)

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 11:30 am
by alex.barylski
I agree with most of what Mike says...minus the fact .NET is a power tool when used effectively...lets face it both OSS/Linux versus .NET have their pros and cons...it's like comparing apples to oranges....Dot NET is fine...so long as u don't mind spending the money and time learning it...whats nice about MS technologies is there is no shortage of MS documentation PHP cannot really compete most articles/docs are done by volunteers and the quality varies drastically.

MSDN is the best documentation hands down but open source is open source and by virtue of that fact...it has it's advantages as well.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 8:21 pm
by mrjameswong
HA, no kidding.
Doug G wrote:An old saying: 'tis a poor workman who blames his tools'.

This is just another typical anti-MS rant from someone who apparently expects to learn a completely new very complex system in a few minutes.

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 8:42 pm
by Eran
MSDN is the best documentation hands down
Really? I found php.net to be much more helpful. Not to mention there is a lot of added value in the comments. php.net is really one of the best documentation efforts I'd ever seen (especially for open-source).

Re: DotNet --- AUAAAUGUGHH!

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 11:50 pm
by volomike
pytrin wrote:
MSDN is the best documentation hands down
Really? I found php.net to be much more helpful. Not to mention there is a lot of added value in the comments. php.net is really one of the best documentation efforts I'd ever seen (especially for open-source).
It was php.net, and especially those comments, that were part of the total picture that got me to move from DotNet to PHP.