MVC

One of my most read (and most commented on) posts was the one claiming “ASP.NET sucks”, which only goes to show being a little offensive goes disappointingly far on the internet. Since it has now been five years since I posted that, I thought a quick follow-up was in order.

I stand by most of what I said my initial post, but with a little specificity. It’s not ASP.net that’s the problem but Webforms. Unfortunately at the time Webforms was all you ever saw. There are alternatives around today (and may have been back then but none were especially high profile and none were by Microsoft). These days of course Webforms are very much out of fashion. Following on from the success of Rails Microsoft realised that Webforms weren’t an idea that could keep up with modern web development. A quick glance at the ASP.net home page today shows four out of five articles talking solely about ASP.net MVC and one article talking about both MVC and Webforms (of course that will vary by day I but I doubt the result will be very different).

So taking into account a minor title change (ASP.net Webforms suck!) I’d say my original point stands.

IBM are working on an impressive looking product called QED Wiki, developed with the Zend Framework.

Fundamentally it’s a wiki like any other. But there is a cool layer on top of it that could be revolutionary (although like many Web 2.0 concepts will probably fall short and just be “cool” - we can hope). The interface allows you to create “situational applications” that can link different components together with the ease of a wiki. It doesn’t really make much sense just reading about it so go watch the video about it.

On a related note, you can now get snapshots of PHP 6.