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Comment by minionslave | Hacker News Reader

If I'm learning ASP.NET for the first time. Should I start with Classic ASP.NET or should I learn CORE?

I would learn ASP.NET Core. It's a significant design shift that has some growing pains for the community but will be a big improvement. I like Core because it's easier to build a minimal website (without all the bloat that comes with ASP.NET 4 and previous, like System.Web). Also your application specifies most of the behavior now, rather than relying on IIS configuration.

Performance benchmarks have also been exciting: https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks

Learn Core using Visual Studio Code. It will help you to figure out the low level framework.

I am working on samples for aspnetcore here https://github.com/dodyg/practical-aspnetcore

That's actually a really good tip. Doing stuff manually would make understanding it better. Especially when things go wrong, I'll know where to look

As a long-time ASP.NET developer, I definitely find the VSCode approach worthwhile. The new platform is definitely much more commandline oriented, but it's refreshing to be able to develop in such a lightweight text editor, compared the the usual Visual Studio experience.

This is also one of the reasons I have really grown to dislike convention-over-configuration approaches.

Boilerplate code sucks, but there are ways to minimize it, and when something breaks you can follow the path through your code to see why.. you don't have to try to discern the interaction between the framework code, your code, defaults/convention and values you do have configured.

If you're just starting to learn then it probably doesn't matter too much. ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Core are very similar. WebForms (if that is what you mean by Classic - not pre .NET JScript/VBScript) is different, and horrible.

The MVC pattern is the same and you will be learning C# and Razor for both. The differences are in the details but many of the skills will be transferable. For example, the way bundling and minification are done is now different (built-in before and now JavaScript runners like gulp).

Shameless plug; I cover these difference in my book "ASP.NET Core 1.0 High Performance": https://unop.uk/book

Depends which type of companies you want to apply for.

On the enterprise space, .NET Core is still quite irrelevant.

Our customers are slowly migrating from .NET 4.0 to .NET 4.5 (not even 4.5.2!), let alone .NET 4.6 or .NET Core.

I think this is a fair assessment. You can't really say .NET Core carte blanche without these kind of parameters. Especially if the enterprise space is primary on windows servers. I think having an understanding of both would be ideal.

I'm going to disagree with all of the comments here so far, and say that if you're looking to learn ASP.NET with the aim of using it at work, you should stick with ASP.NET MVC.

If you're learning for the fun of it, it really doesn't matter, but 99% of work being done in ASP.NET is on the existing .NET stack (MVC/WebForms). It's not a corporate thing, or an enterprise thing. We use .NET because it's a mature platform, and ASP.NET MVC works. I work in an agency on MVC builds, and I doubt we'll be using .NET Core for at least a few years.

Really, it wouldn't matter. At this point, think of Core as a subset of asp.net. It has quite a few APIs removed for cross-platform functionality.

If you know one, you can easily move to the other

Oh okay, Thanks. I thought it was a complete API rewrite. I guess I'll just learn Core

Just know I am grossly simplifying it. :) The point I want to get across if that if you learn one, you already know the other.

Any new project I make will be using Core. It is the direction .net is headed.

It's also added a bunch of stuff too, notably built-in dependency injection. But there are a lot of others as well.

CORE. It's not much different than regular ASP.NET. However they both are very different from Classic ASP.NET

I've been writing ASP.NET since 2004 (and classic ASP using VBScript before that) and I'm not sure what distinguishes "regular ASP.NET" from "Classic ASP.NET". I hear this term occasionally - what exactly do folks think of when they say "Classic ASP.NET"? WebForms? Pre-Razor view engine?

Yeah, pretty much.

Regular = MVC/WebAPI

Classic/Old/Shit = Webforms

I was editing some Classic ASP code the other day and had a chuckle because it very much reminded me of Razor templating I worked on a day before.

Classic ASP with JScript always reminds me of node. How things cycle back around...

require('foo'); reminds me of include('foo.php'); as well.

Yeah, I tend to think of ASP as being similar to PHP 4

That's what happens if you don't use a model and some sensible HtmlHelper extensions. Generally you can easily write razor with very little code in it, some ifs and foreachs is usually about all you need.

I think you misunderstand, I wasn't implying that Razor is messy. Well written Classic ASP is just as clean with most of the code existing outside of the page in SSIs.

It either case it comes down to discipline.

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