Should I learn ASP.NET, or go straight to MVC?
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
Try them both. You can whip out a project in each in a few days and see what the differences are. If you're really going to learn ASP.NET development you should be experimenting with tons of small projects. You can find samples of both here on CP. If you got a job today the chances are it wouldn't be MVC based.
Todd Smith
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
Just to throw a spanner in the works there's also the Web Client Software Factory from patterns and practices! You can even combine the two frameworks to an extent. As others have said you probably need to learn a bit of classic ASP.NET from scratch first.
Kevin
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
Interesting question Phil, and one I was pondering earlier: Do IDE's promote bad design from the outset? You know, double click the button and start coding without thought to good design/proven techniques/patterns. In the one instance, it'd be great if the IDE enforced good design from the outset. Instead of merely wiring up a click event, it forced the user down a well know and proven route. In the second, it begs the question whether or not these well known designs/proven techniques/patterns are any good or even appropriate to the given the problem at hand. So, to answer your question, buggered if I know.
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Interesting question Phil, and one I was pondering earlier: Do IDE's promote bad design from the outset? You know, double click the button and start coding without thought to good design/proven techniques/patterns. In the one instance, it'd be great if the IDE enforced good design from the outset. Instead of merely wiring up a click event, it forced the user down a well know and proven route. In the second, it begs the question whether or not these well known designs/proven techniques/patterns are any good or even appropriate to the given the problem at hand. So, to answer your question, buggered if I know.
martin_hughes wrote:
Do IDE's promote bad design from the outset? You know, double click the button and start coding without thought to good design/proven techniques/patterns. In the one instance, it'd be great if the IDE enforced good design from the outset. Instead of merely wiring up a click event, it forced the user down a well know and proven route.
Actually, I was wondering if it would be more efficient to use command line build tools to enforce good coding standards. Since you're limited to managing a small subset of files at once, it forces you to keep your code compact and as manageable as possible. Perhaps using nant/msbuild, NUnit, and a good code generation engine would offset the need to use an IDE altogether (aside from the intellisense, and syntax highlighting, of course). What do you think?
martin_hughes wrote:
In the second, it begs the question whether or not these well known designs/proven techniques/patterns are any good or even appropriate to the given the problem at hand.
In this case, I think it's better to question the developer who uses the tool, and not the tool itself. You can easily create masterpieces if you know which tools are right for the job; in contrast, one could easily just as spaghetti code if you use the wrong tools. So the answer to your question really depends on how knowledgeable the developer is with whatever tool he/she is using for whatever problem is at hand.
Do you know...LinFu?
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
No no, don't do it. Phew! One less to compete against. Right guys? Guys? Guys?
“If we are all in agreement on the decision - then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”-Alfred P. Sloan
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martin_hughes wrote:
Do IDE's promote bad design from the outset? You know, double click the button and start coding without thought to good design/proven techniques/patterns. In the one instance, it'd be great if the IDE enforced good design from the outset. Instead of merely wiring up a click event, it forced the user down a well know and proven route.
Actually, I was wondering if it would be more efficient to use command line build tools to enforce good coding standards. Since you're limited to managing a small subset of files at once, it forces you to keep your code compact and as manageable as possible. Perhaps using nant/msbuild, NUnit, and a good code generation engine would offset the need to use an IDE altogether (aside from the intellisense, and syntax highlighting, of course). What do you think?
martin_hughes wrote:
In the second, it begs the question whether or not these well known designs/proven techniques/patterns are any good or even appropriate to the given the problem at hand.
In this case, I think it's better to question the developer who uses the tool, and not the tool itself. You can easily create masterpieces if you know which tools are right for the job; in contrast, one could easily just as spaghetti code if you use the wrong tools. So the answer to your question really depends on how knowledgeable the developer is with whatever tool he/she is using for whatever problem is at hand.
Do you know...LinFu?
Philip Laureano wrote:
Actually, I was wondering if it would be more efficient to use command line build tools to enforce good coding standards. Since you're limited to managing a small subset of files at once, it forces you to keep your code compact and as manageable as possible. Perhaps using nant/msbuild, NUnit, and a good code generation engine would offset the need to use an IDE altogether (aside from the intellisense, and syntax highlighting, of course).
More importantly, doing so forces the user to have a better understanding of what's really going on... rather than simply drawing buttons on a form and wiring up events and thinking "Hey, I'm a software developer!"
Philip Laureano wrote:
So the answer to your question really depends on how knowledgeable the developer is with whatever tool he/she is using for whatever problem is at hand.
Ratio of bad developers (I'm in this camp :) ) to good developers (you can go in this one!): 100000/1. And yet there's still all that code to write!
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+1. Web developers who do not understand the page lifecycle drive me nuts. Also, there are things you can do in ASP.NET that can't be done in MVC (yet)...though MVC is much better at forcing separation of logic. I think both are worth knowing, but I honestly prefer using the MVC pattern (or MVP, actually) in ASP.NET. I get the power of .NET when I need it and it forces me to have the discipline to keep things as separate as possible.
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Just to throw a spanner in the works there's also the Web Client Software Factory from patterns and practices! You can even combine the two frameworks to an extent. As others have said you probably need to learn a bit of classic ASP.NET from scratch first.
Kevin
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My own personal pet peeve, but I hate WCSF. I thik it and its cousin WSSF create extremely bloated solution files that ultimately do not produce faster results and do too much hand-holding for the developer.
How does it compare with ASP.NET MVC? I've not used either of them although I did download WCSF a while back and have it sitting there gathering dust. :laugh:
Kevin
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Philip Laureano wrote:
Actually, I was wondering if it would be more efficient to use command line build tools to enforce good coding standards. Since you're limited to managing a small subset of files at once, it forces you to keep your code compact and as manageable as possible. Perhaps using nant/msbuild, NUnit, and a good code generation engine would offset the need to use an IDE altogether (aside from the intellisense, and syntax highlighting, of course).
More importantly, doing so forces the user to have a better understanding of what's really going on... rather than simply drawing buttons on a form and wiring up events and thinking "Hey, I'm a software developer!"
Philip Laureano wrote:
So the answer to your question really depends on how knowledgeable the developer is with whatever tool he/she is using for whatever problem is at hand.
Ratio of bad developers (I'm in this camp :) ) to good developers (you can go in this one!): 100000/1. And yet there's still all that code to write!
martin_hughes wrote:
More importantly, doing so forces the user to have a better understanding of what's really going on... rather than simply drawing buttons on a form and wiring up events and thinking "Hey, I'm a software developer!"
My take on this is that designers, etc. are productivity tools. They're not substitutes for becoming a good developer. Once you learn what's going on without the tools why would you then continue without tools indefinitely? What purpose would it serve to, e.g., write all your WPF apps in raw XAML? It would be tedious, error-prone and expensive.
Kevin
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martin_hughes wrote:
More importantly, doing so forces the user to have a better understanding of what's really going on... rather than simply drawing buttons on a form and wiring up events and thinking "Hey, I'm a software developer!"
My take on this is that designers, etc. are productivity tools. They're not substitutes for becoming a good developer. Once you learn what's going on without the tools why would you then continue without tools indefinitely? What purpose would it serve to, e.g., write all your WPF apps in raw XAML? It would be tedious, error-prone and expensive.
Kevin
I agree, designers should be productivity tools... but for those who know how to do it the hard way! The problem I see is that a huge number of new developers know next to nothing about what goes on behind the scenes, and so are far less well equipped to actually understand how these things work. And yet... there is a clear need for people who are something else first and software developers second to write software, perhaps making use of intimate business knowledge or similar. To these people the actual plumbing and workings of compilers/patterns/objects/heaps/stacks and whatnot is secondary (or even tertiary) to solving the business problem at hand. In that respect the tools are not nearly good enough, as they should force good design on the "user" (let's call them users rather than developers)rather than leave them to their own devices.
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How does it compare with ASP.NET MVC? I've not used either of them although I did download WCSF a while back and have it sitting there gathering dust. :laugh:
Kevin
Well, it's not built like MVC. WCSF is still using the ASP.NET model, so I'd argue tht it's still pretty different from the MVC stuff that's in CTP/Beta at the moment (though to be fair I'm only familiar with MVC at a very high level). I didn't like WCSF becaue of its implementaton of PageFlow using WF (I think their implementation of PagFlow kind of sucks compared to what you can do with staright WF) and I don't ike having to create a project for every subfolder of your app...or was it every presenter? I forget, been about a year. I just thought it needlessly bloated the soluton forvery little benefit. It also confused the hell out of our junior devs, which seems to be the opposite of what a software factory should do. My 0.02.
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Well, it's not built like MVC. WCSF is still using the ASP.NET model, so I'd argue tht it's still pretty different from the MVC stuff that's in CTP/Beta at the moment (though to be fair I'm only familiar with MVC at a very high level). I didn't like WCSF becaue of its implementaton of PageFlow using WF (I think their implementation of PagFlow kind of sucks compared to what you can do with staright WF) and I don't ike having to create a project for every subfolder of your app...or was it every presenter? I forget, been about a year. I just thought it needlessly bloated the soluton forvery little benefit. It also confused the hell out of our junior devs, which seems to be the opposite of what a software factory should do. My 0.02.
Hmmm. I wonder if it will fade away when ASP.NET MVC goes gold?
Kevin
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
OK, as the previous sub-thread discusses tool use, they've really hit on some of the big questions about these two technologies. Here is a http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=ASP.NET+MVC[^]to Scott Hanselman's blog, with a category on MVC. There's a lot there, he and the many others still building MVC do quite a lot of blogging. That's worthy of note, MVC is still very new, in fact, they took feedback and went back to the drawing board like 4 times before its current version. So, on to the tough question. Why do you want to learn ASP.NET? For fun? For work? For a big project? Are you being paid? Here's my answer, YMMV. If you want to start small, you use ASP.NET. What it basically provides is a way to make Web Sites in the same basic ways you make Windows Apps. So if you drag a "button" control onto the web page canvas, it will create the relevant HTML, add the appropriate javascript and basically set you up with a working button in a matter of seconds. This is actually pretty cool, it abstracts a bunch of the Javascript! Honestly, you can build some pretty nice sites with little or no Javascript knowledge. Learn a little bit of CSS & HTML and you can make reasonable sites quickly with very little overhead. Use the AJAX libraries and you can make some pretty cool web apps very quickly. Here's the big caveat. As you dig deeper, the layer of abstraction breaks down. As the problems get more complex, you'll need to start learning Javascript, you'll need to know the dirty secrets of HTML and CSS. And I mean dirty, you'll look at stuff and say "Man, that's such a hack". We had a joke around the office that Javascript itself was basically "just a hack", but honestly, it works and it's quite powerful (just not always pretty :) But I'm not really answering your question ASP vs MVC. I'm getting there. You see, when I said that ASP.NET does some of the abstraction for you, well MVC actually takes away some of that abstraction! In fact, in some ways it resembles the much-maligned ASP classic. Why the "backwards change"? Well for one, it's easier to test. If you're building a web app with 20 other developers and 20 QA people, ASP.NET (no MVC) is kind of nightmarish to test. It doesn't really support unit tests, there's no clear separa
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
Ambiguous acronyms drive me crazy. They make me feel and look stupid when I have to ask about them. Please, what is this particular MVC you're all talking about? Wikipedia says it can mean the Model-View-Controller architecture, a MIVA script file or an operation in the instruction set of IBM's System/360 mainframe computers. The topic is web design, so that rules out the latter (I hope!). But somehow what you are all describing doesn't seem to fit the first two wiki entries, either.
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As a backend coder, I never really took the time to learn the frontend since I'm not really the artistic type, but now that I want to start writing web apps, I'm not sure which learning track I should follow when getting up to speed with web development. Should I start learning ASP.NET from scratch, or should I use the MVC to keep my code more simple? Which one is easier to learn in the shortest amount of time?
Do you know...LinFu?
It's funny to see people talking about the MVC design pattern like it came out just yesterday. I know it's been around over 10 years years! Also it's a design pattern. ASP.NET is a technology. How do they relate? The only reason people are talking about it now because of Microsoft Marketing. You can argue separation of concerns and all that crap. It would be hard pressed for anyone to justify the value in using MVC over other patterns. What question was actually confusing but I get what the person is asking. My answer learn both. Like someone mentioned before, when learning ASP.NET make sure you fully grasp the page lifecycle stuff. Very important.
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It's funny to see people talking about the MVC design pattern like it came out just yesterday. I know it's been around over 10 years years! Also it's a design pattern. ASP.NET is a technology. How do they relate? The only reason people are talking about it now because of Microsoft Marketing. You can argue separation of concerns and all that crap. It would be hard pressed for anyone to justify the value in using MVC over other patterns. What question was actually confusing but I get what the person is asking. My answer learn both. Like someone mentioned before, when learning ASP.NET make sure you fully grasp the page lifecycle stuff. Very important.
kjmcsd wrote:
It's funny to see people talking about the MVC design pattern like it came out just yesterday. I know it's been around over 10 years years! Also it's a design pattern. ASP.NET is a technology. How do they relate?
Sorry, I actually meant ASP.NET vs ASP.NET MVC--not the MVC pattern itself. AFAIK, the MVC pattern has been around since Smalltalk, so it's way older than just a single decade. In any case, you're right--I'll just have to start with the basics of ASP.NET, and work my way up.
Do you know...LinFu?