Hacker News Reader

Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

I really don't think the ASP.NET MVC can be classified as a black sheep. Neither are things like Linq or Entity Framework. Microsoft is still doing a lot of the interesting stuff in-house.

View on HN

MVC was developed skunk works style, as was Linq. And MS has only begun embracing MVC anywhere near fully lately. Meanwhile, Linq has been effectively abandoned in preference to the bloated entity framework.

If Microsoft had their heads screwed on straight MVC would be the default ASP.NET web-site project type in Visual Studio and Linq would have gotten the love it deserved, even if it competed with EF. I fear that without Haack's leadership MVC will be mishandled and slowly die off.

Edit: To clarify, I mean Linq to SQL. It was a decent, lightweight, highly usable ORM that has now been more or less deprecated in favor of EF. For now it's not so bad because Linq to SQL only just recently wandered off into the twilight, but eventually the lack of support will make it harder and harder to use and EF will be the only option.

LINQ works /with/ entity framework, as well as with XML and generic collections. Entity Framework is not a replacement for LINQ.

Also, I think it's a natural progression for the project to start out as a "skunkworks" system, and be gradually more mainlined as it matures. It's on version 3 now, and version 4 is right around the corner.

I'd rather see it happen that way than have a huge release and a giant push onto a platform that isn't fully realized. Most "enterprise" organizations would never move onto a version 1.0 platform anyway.

Linq != Linq To Sql

Note: I never used linq-to-sql, but in my experience EF (especially with the code-first stuff) is a decent, lightweight, and highly usable.

lightweight? seriously?

http://servicestack.net/benchmarks/

Seriously, it's easy to work with and doesn't get in my way. The fact that it may take a few more ms to do some things that probably aren't my bottleneck doesn't matter.

A few more ms != The slowest ORM, that's a factor of times slower.

Unless you've got a free ticket onboard the MSFacts Train.

EF seems very much targeted towards "enterprisey" line of business apps, where ease of development is critical and performance is a side note. Microsoft just does not care to make a high-performance web stack. Even in the next generation of Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC stuff is still an optional download. How many production sites in the world are using EF? Microsoft is still very much mired in the idea of selling tools to developers who tend to be on the lowest rung of the skill-tree and who build mediocre internal apps at big companies. They're solution to scaling and efficiency is to buy bigger boxes, higher end Windows licenses, and more of them.

That strategy has certainly fattened their wallets handsomely over the last several decades, but it's ultimately self-defeating. By failing to capture the most skilled developers, and by failing to cater to the most critical development needs (high-throughput business critical web services being a prime example) they have been alienating such developers. And those developers are ultimately the ones who set the standards (in some cases literally, when they are in positions of power at large companies) that other developers tend to follow. And that momentum can be difficult to break. By the time MS realizes it they will be obsolete faster than they can react. And it won't be because the entire world changed overnight, it'll be because the world has been changing for a long long time and it will have finally caught up to their core business.

...free ticket onboard the MSFacts Train

I didn't realize I was having a discussion on Slashdot. My mistake.

Actually ludicrous statements draws these responses on all forum sites.

MVC has to be one of the most non-skunkworks projects in Microsoft history. Scott Guthrie (senior management) was involved from the very beginning, and there were frequent preview and beta releases through the entire development cycle. Couldn't have been more open, both inside and outside of Microsoft. Maybe there's another meaning of skunkworks I'm not aware of?

Also, FWIW, a lot of Microsoft's biggest public facing sites run on ASP.NET MVC now, so even if you assumed a lot of stupidity or evilness, there's a lot of inertia behind ASP.NET MVC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com