Yesterday, I was one of the panelist at grillrb.com conference. The panel title was Similarities, differences and possible idea transfers between ASP.NET, Django and Ruby on Rails (in Polish: ‘Podobieństwa, różnice oraz możliwości transferu rozwiązań pomiędzy technologiami ASP.NET, Django oraz Ruby on Rails’). We had a nice, friendly discussion – no one got hurt ;). I think I gave reasonable answers (but if you saw me speaking – please give me feedback – thanks) and put some good insights into the discussion.
But in one of the topic that was titled: the weakest part of the framework (but a bit better translation would be: the biggest disadvantage of framework; in Polish: ‘najsłabsza strona frameworka’) and in case of ASP.NET the first reaction, even from the audience, was: it’s ‘Microsoft’. Of course I strongly disagreed 😉 but I did not wanted to go with full explanations about that during the panel – but I fell quite motivated to do it here.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft, they do not pay me in cash or in tools – I’m not (and never was) an MVP. My only connection is that I use the tools, I like the tools and that I’m one of the organizers of Wroc.NET – a Microsoft-based community group here in Wroclaw area. They do occasionally send some giveaways for the attendees.

Having wrote that I also need to mention that, I guess, I am biased 😉 so just read what I have to say and have your own opinion.

Lets begin. If you think your biggest problem with ASP.NET is that it’s Microsoft than you don’t have to worry that much. It’s not.

Microsoft it’s not the same Microsoft (or M$ as people used to write) as it was 8-, 4- or even 2 years ago. The company has made a huge progress in terms of how it works with the community and how the tools are developed, published and maintained. If you remember closed, API difficult to work with, obscure tools and sentences like ‘Linux is a cancer’ then I encourage you to take a closer look again. You will be surprised.

Now you have people in ASP.NET division like Scott Hanselman (very active for a very long time), Scott Guthrie (a bit less active in web right now; more Azure), and previously Phil Haack (no longer in ASP.NET)  opening their tools/APIs and opening to community. I think it was during the development of ASP.NET MVC where they actively ask community to work with them on the API. Having ASP.NET source on codeplex, ASP.NET core on github is a huge milestone if you think of Microsoft few years back. Just take a peek at asp.net.

To be fair – I’m not saying it’s all good – I’m not saying that ASP.NET is the best platform for web – it’s not (but it’s quite good :]) – just saying that if you think your biggest problem with ASP.NET is Microsoft – then you don’t have a problem. ASP.NET is quite stable platform and MVC-flavor of it is a modern, (quite)easy to work with platform for web development. If you like new things – give it a try. I with I will try some Ruby magic in a near future.