There is a very interesting discussion going on over at Sasha Sydoruk’s blog. The signal to noise ratio is surprisingly high for the subject matter being discussed.
Sasha posed the question asking where are all the cool and new web sites that run ASP.NET. Other than MySpace, which moved from ColdFusion to ASP.NET a few years ago, and really isn’t that cool or new anymore, why are all the other “cool” sites running some other technology?
Reading this discussion is the first time I’ve actually missed doing the other the “P” or Rails type web development. I was starting to see some of my old feeling in the comments posted. I haven’t been all that impressed with webforms in asp.net for quite sometime.
MonoRail is pretty damn cool. In fact, MonoRail is so close to a “P” or the “R” type web development experience.
I think maybe that I just miss web development a bit. Which is insane! I hate web development. It is a huge pain in the ass. JavaScript is a pain. CSS is nice and all, but I find it painful. Maybe I find it painful because I never properly mastered it so I always have to reference docs to see if I have selectors right. But no. I think it has more to do with the fact that it would be insane to not continue to target IE6, since it is still the most widespread browser, yet it is nasty, nasty, nasty to try to use nice web features like CSS2 and CSS3 which are supported by Firefox and Opera, which will never be supported by IE6.
Maybe it is because “P”, the “R” and even Webforms are slowly becoming irrelevant on the UI side as Flash via Flex and Silverlight become more capable of building great web applications instead of just great games. On the back end side I know what development experience I like. It has little to do with Visual Studio and more to do with C# and CodeRush. Maybe I’m too tied to C#.
I must say that I certainly think in C# these days. That is, when I look at python list comprehension, generators and even ruby blocks, I immediately think of them in terms of C#. C# can do all those things and they are actually very similar to how it is done in python or ruby. What I’m not very good at is thinking of a nice internal business-case DSL in C# and thinking about how it would look in Ruby or Python. I think this is my current thought limitation. I hope the discussion I read over at Sasha’s has caused me to find a place where I can learn and grow.