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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

And I still see web developers who reject the idea that we have troublesome webkit monoculture. And when you ask them what non-webkit browsers they are testing on, they're response while not literally "What do you mean testing?", effectively conveys the same: "Just use latest Chrome (Works on my machine)".

When Microsoft created its initial version of ASP.Net, it was mainly designed to allow Windows VB6 point-and-click programmers to create web applications without understanding how the web worked. It was a joke of a web-framework.

The irony is that right now, I can tell the current crop of "ninja" web-developers (who rightfully rejected ASP.Net and its ilk) are starting more and more to look like this generation's VB6 programmers: Unambitious. Untalented. Unprincipled. Web-standards? Whatever works, and this works on my machine.

It's quite frightening. I thought we were past this shit.

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> The irony is that right now, I can tell the current crop of "ninja" web-developers (who rightfully rejected ASP.Net and its ilk) are starting more and more to look like this generation's VB6 programmers: Unambitious. Untalented. Unprincipled. Web-standards? Whatever works, and this works on my machine.

Anything which is commoditized will see a dip in quality. Including programmers for popular languages/frameworks/etc.

There were a lot of very talented VB6, ASP Classic, and similar programmers. There was also a lot of corporate programmers who didn't care and just did what needed to be done.

I think the same is true now. Ultimately you get what you pay for, if companies want the lowest bidder and want it down quickly rather than correctly then they only have themselves to blame.

I will say that I do hope frameworks save us to a certain degree. If they're targeting JQuery, Bootstrap, or similar it will give them Edge/Firefox for "free" even if WebKit is their primary target.

That's why it's particularly frustrating that Firefox isn't a really good, fast, spec-compliant browser. Mozilla holds that flag, but little things like HTML5 input types are not implemented in Firefox yet.

Chrome isn't perfect to be sure, but Firefox really seems to be lagging. Hopefully now that they've dropped Firefox OS and Thunderbird they can focus solely on Firefox, because we really need Firefox to exist.

> It was a joke of a web-framework.

Hey, at least it wasn't ASP classic

I'm pretty sure he meant ASP Classic. In any case ASP.NET a.k.a. ASP.NET Core is one of the best looking frameworks right now.

Yep, it is open source, cross-platform, with a fantastic MVC framework and an elegant language (C#).

Visual Studio is of course proprietary and windows-only, but it isn't necessary to use. Although you'd be a fool not to use it.

ASP.NET Core 1 (formerly ASP.NET 5.0) development works great in Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/, which is FOSS (MIT license) https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/ and works on Linux and OS X as well as Windows.

A lot of people don't realize that Visual Studio Code is, in fact, it's own product and not a version of full Visual Studio.

You should check out Project Rider[0].

[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2016/01/13/project-rider-a...

I think he meant the original ASP.NET -- webforms. That version basically was windows forms but on the web in a bizarre way. Also it's poopy doodoo and I don't recommend using it (webforms I mean, not the modern ASP.NET)

I wonder if that's the case (what was meant). When I first worked with ASP.NET 1.1, getting it to work (feature-level) with Opera often required forgoing most of the "managed" control properties and using CSS/JS directly. The backend .NET code was much more of a joy to work with than Classic ASP, but the managed ASP.NET frontend portion, not as much.

This is the answer. Asp.net 1.1 was mostly designed for "drag'n'drop" pixel aligned "form" layouts. Optimised for VB6 devs. Definitely not webby.

It wasn't until Microsoft started with asp.net MVC that asp.net finally started going somewhere properly.

And that was ironically much closer to classic asp and "real" web programming than the initial versions of asp.net ever was.

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