Fri

Mar 3
2006

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

ASP.Net on a Roll

With all of the buzz about Ruby on Rails and AJAX, not a lot of people have noticed that Microsoft is making another really good run at the web development space. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of course, Ruby on Rails didn't exist a year ago, and it now represents a market that is 1/6 the size of the PHP and ASP book markets, and all that generated by a single book (versus 50-60 titles each for PHP and ASP.) Still, our numbers indicate a *lot* of enthusiasm for ASP 2.0.

What's particularly interesting is the way that Microsoft is reaching out to attract PHP, JSP and Cold Fusion developers. They've engaged both O'Reilly and Dr. Dobb's Journal to co-produce an ASP 2.0 training center, on the theory that we're going to be better than they are at reaching out to non-Microsoft developers. And rather than just the usual product pitches, they've actually asked us to provide information on interoperability between these various web programming toolsets. (As an incentive to get folks to try ASP.Net 2.0, they're also offering a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 to anyone who listens to three of the webcasts they've put on the site.)

The book sales data I referred to is from our research data mart, which includes data from Nielsen Bookscan's point of sale data service, plus other information we've spidered off the net. One of the principal visualization tools we use is a treemap, in which the size of a square represents the relative size of a category, and the color represents the rate of change (green for up, red for down, black for unchanged, with the intensity proportional to the rate). Here's the treemap showing sales of books on web development technologies compared to a year ago. (Note that this treemap doesn't just include server-side development technologies like ASP, JSP, and PHP, but also pure client side technologies like Javascript -- which, due to the AJAX phenomenon, has jumped even more radically than ASP.)

asptreemap.jpg

See Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator for a more detailed description of our technique.

I'd be really interested to hear from PHP and JSP developers who do try out ASP.Net 2.0. Does Microsoft really have something here? Or is it still just a product that is going to be adopted only by the Microsoft developer community. They are paying attention. I'd love to see some effort paid to giving them some substantial feedback on their interoperability efforts, and the product in general.

These are interesting times for Microsoft. They are no longer the undoubted king of the hill, and like IBM before them, they are embarking on a brave new voyage of exploration of what it means to be part of an ecosystem rather than just the top predator in it.


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Comments: 48

  Josh Wand [03.03.06 02:34 PM]

Whoa. What are you guys using for your data viz software? Looks impressive. And it runs on Cocoa! I must know.

  dusty [03.03.06 02:46 PM]

What I found interesting about the ASP 2.0 training center is that if you go to the Resources for PHP developers section, they have articles about running PHP, MySQL, and Apache on Linux. I kind of briefly skimmed over the articles, but I didn't see many refrences to Windows or ASP at all.

  Joe [03.03.06 06:16 PM]

Well, if you put out a new version of Programming Python, I'd buy it and boost the Python book sales. But I'm not going to buy a 5 year old book on a programming language. And the Python in a Nutshell could use a revamp as well.

  anonymous [03.03.06 09:16 PM]

I'd be really interested to hear from PHP and JSP developers who do try out ASP.Net 2.0.



Heh. That's like asking Miller Lite drinkers, "So, this Budweiser beer--how is it?"

  Kevin Farnham [03.03.06 10:16 PM]

The large size of the Javascript box surprises me. As well as the tiny and declining size of "lamp" down in the lower right (assuming "lamp" is like Oreillynet's OnLAMP.com). But, this graph is only for the use of technologies for web applications, right?

I'll be happy to give ASP 2.0 a try if Microsoft will provide the development platform. Though I've worked more in Unix than Windows, a few years ago I was leading development of a suite of Windows enterprise applications that included an ASP rich web client. When .NET came out and I realized that the level of effort for porting old ASP to ASP.NET was similar to a rewrite, we abandoned the old application and developed our new web client using Java/XML/HTML technology.

One area where Microsoft excels (in my opinion) is in the development tools they provide. The tools are costly, certainly. But, when you take Visual Studio and the MSDN resource and set them in front of a "typical" developer, getting started in developing something useful is fairly easy.

Yes, there are multiple downsides (easy programming can produce clunky code that is not suitable for enterprise applications, for example), but -- I find this ASP 2.0 development quite interesting.

And I'll be happy to give ASP 2.0 a test drive and write some articles about it for Oreillynet.com.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.03.06 10:16 PM]

Josh --

The treemap visualization was originally developed by Ben Schneiderman at the University of Maryland. See http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/ for details.

We found an open source implementation in Java (sorry, but I don't have the link -- however, you can find a number of them via google), and hacked on it to make it do what we want. We then hooked it up to a data warehouse built with MySQL. We've done other implementations with mod_perl, and I believe even a DHTML version, but this is the one I use most often.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.03.06 10:22 PM]

Kevin -- three things:

1. JavaScript has always been a bigger category than people have given it credit for. David Flanagan's Javascript: The Definitive Guide is one of the top selling books we've ever published. But the recent interest in AJAX has really goosed Javascript sales.

2. As noted on the ASP 2.0 Training Center, listen to three of the Microsoft webcasts and you'll get a free copy of Visual Studio, which includes ASP.Net 2.0 development tools.

3. If you're interested in writing articles, talk to Preston Gralla, who is the O'Reilly Network editor in charge of Microsoft-related technologies. Not sure if he needs more, but is willing to talk. preston. gralla.com. You know where the @ goes.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.03.06 10:25 PM]

Anonymous -- I don't like to think of my readers as the kind of people who would drink either Bud OR Miller Lite. So I was thinking it was more like asking someone who drinks Stella Artois to try Hefeweizen, or someone who likes Heineken Dark to try Negra Modelo. :-)

  Sam [03.04.06 03:06 AM]

How about a book "IIS for Apache administrators"
or "ASP for Perl Programmers"?


Useful for those of who have to figure out how braindead things work, while trying to map that onto the concepts that Apache et al use that we learnt previously.

  Ewan [03.04.06 03:30 AM]

Shame the pack they are giving out is only for US/Canada. They've probably lost alot of people from Europe by now.

  Mats Henricson [03.04.06 04:01 AM]

Who buys JSP books these days? It is known to be an outdated technology you only use in small hacks. For real projects you use Struts, WebWork, Tapestry or JSF. Typically.

  Steve [03.04.06 06:37 AM]

If you're interested ...

Scroll down to where it says 'Data Visualization Components' and you can download and use a Treemap control for .NET and ASP.NET created by Microsoft Research.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx

I'm currently enjoying developing with Atlas on ASP.NET.

  Alex Barnett [03.04.06 07:07 AM]

HI Tim. On point two you make in your follow-up comment:

"2. As noted on the ASP 2.0 Training Center, listen to three of the Microsoft webcasts and you'll get a free copy of Visual Studio, which includes ASP.Net 2.0 development tools."

Please note this is for US and Canada only. Its hould say so on the site before users sign up, but it doesn't. Can I suggest this is made clearer on the site?

thanks,

Alex.

  Jeffrey McManus [03.04.06 10:12 AM]

"I'll be happy to give ASP 2.0 a try if Microsoft will provide the development platform."

Presumably you mean the development environment? They've already done this. It's here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/default.aspx

  Brian Goldfarb [03.04.06 10:17 AM]

You can get Visual Web Developer Express for free from anywhere as a way to kick the tires -- it is missing very few WEB development features from Standard ($199 upgrade) and will let you see what ASP.NET 2.0 is capable of. Go to http://www.asp.net/ and click the download Visual Web Developer link on the right. Atlas even works with VWD. I'll follow up and see what the deal is with international distributions, but this is a great way to start.

-Brian

  BillyG [03.04.06 10:32 AM]

Thx for this article. I have the Express version but it is only good for a year so I will head there now.

I will also be passing this info on to my school instructors!

  Chris M. [03.04.06 10:35 AM]

>> Who buys JSP books these days?
Mats, have you checked into JSP of late? I recently did a large public project and evaluated all the technologies you mentioned; JSP 2.0 seemed the best and we went with it; JSTL is very powerful, custom taglibs kick ass now, and our designers love how easy it is to work with...

  Will [03.04.06 01:25 PM]

"Thx for this article. I have the Express version but it is only good for a year so I will head there now."

Actually, that's not true.

It's free to use forever (so once you have it, you keep it for as long as you like!). But it is only free to download for a year (that is, it is free to download until November 7th, 2006. And it'll be $49US after that. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing).

There was a whole lot of "chatter" when this was offered in November of last year.

  David L. [03.04.06 04:01 PM]

And I wasn't born a MSFT-lover, but ASP.NET 2.0 is great. The IDE is not perfect; it never will be. But it is much better than the VS2003 generation.

Of course ASP.NET 2.0 is not right for every situation, but I find myself wanting to use it more often than PHP or other Unix-ish alternatives.

  gjuro [03.04.06 04:31 PM]

I just bought "MS Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition" ISBN 0-7356-2212-4 (value of 20-25$, when converted back to US$), which is inside a 49$ pack with VWD 2005 Express - so, there is software, book and there might be some more samples and documentation - and the book is a very good introduction to ASP

  Pat Allan [03.05.06 05:01 AM]

I can't provide much perspective from a PHP/JSP point of view, but I've been coding in ASP.NET for the last three years, and have recently got stuck into Ruby on Rails. I have done a little bit with PHP4 though, and have unfortunately coded in the original ASP.

So, what I like about ASP.NET:
- Code-behind - makes the aspx files so much cleaner. Yes, you can do this in classic ASP or PHP, but not as neatly.
- OO - helps get rid of the spaghetti code
- C# - No need to use VB syntax
- Visual Studio debugging - can make life really easy

What don't I like?
- Postbacks/viewstate - Makes the source ugly as hell, and promoted unncessary calls to the server.
- .NET 1.1/1.0 server controls - invalid HTML. I've not yet used the 2.0 equivalents though.
- Visual Studio 2003 incorrect syntax support

Now that I'm using Ruby on Rails a fair bit, though, I'm missing ActiveRecord and ActionPack when I code in .NET.

  Daniel [03.05.06 07:19 AM]

Unfortunately, we Europeans will need to settle with the Express edition of VS until we decide if ASP.Net 2.0 is the way and can justify a purchase of the full version.

Someone commented that it misses very few features for web dev, but testing integration is one of them, and that's a major one now that we've finally realized the benefits of automated tests.

Testing in Rails is easy and free, to get know how it is in ASP.Net 2.0 I'll have to pay for VS.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.05.06 08:53 AM]

Pat --

I love the level of detail in your comments. I've always wished we could have more straight up discussion of strengths and weaknesses rather than partisanship. That way vendors and projects can learn from each other, and the winners are the users of each system. Dialogue fosters improvement. Thanks.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.05.06 09:02 AM]

Daniel -- I can't speak for Microsoft on why their offer is for US and Canada only, but I do know that when we've tried to do certain types of giveaways in the past (contests in particular), the lawyers have always said we have to limit it. Apparently, there are enough variations in the legal conditions from country to country that making sure you aren't violating some law or other is a nightmare. But I don't really know that first hand. Perhaps someone from Microsoft can comment.

I suppose it could also be because this initiative comes out of the budget of some US group at Microsoft, and Europe would have to kick in to make the offer there. Again, I'm just speculating.

In general, I would agree, given the worldwide nature of the web and the technology that supports it, it seems shortsighted to have a geographically limited offer.

  Brian Goldfab [03.05.06 12:16 PM]

Daniel -- You can download a 180-day free trial of Visual Studio Team Suite (the big box) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/trial/ -- this gives you the testing integration you want to evaluate. And 180-days is a very reasonable amount of time to evaluate.

Pat -- ASP.NET 2.0 is fully standards conformant by default -- definitely a huge issue with ASP.NET 1.x -- the controls emit XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup by default and WCAG/Section 508 accessible conformant by default -- We do real time validation against browsers and standards and even filter intellisense on the fly so you only see what is relevent based on the standard or browser (think IE6, firefox, xhtml strict, transitional etc. I'd encourage you take a look -- also viewstate is no longer necessary for most control features and with "Atlas" the postback story gets even better.

  Brian Goldfab [03.05.06 12:19 PM]

Tim -- I'm following up on the WW offer but the legal issue is probably at the heart of it. The sponsor $$ issue is unlikely a factor and if it is, I'll have it fixed -- I have emails in trying to get my head around this now.

  Billy [03.05.06 02:58 PM]

Thx Will, I stand corrected:

from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing).:

"as long as you download Visual Studio Express on or before November 7th 2006, you will not have to pay for it"

I was gone all weekend, so now I can go to http://aspnet.cmp.com/ for the webcasts.

  Pat Allan [03.05.06 05:05 PM]

Tim, thanks for your words of praise.

Brian, I'm looking forward to trying out VS2005/ASP.NET 2, but we're currently having enough trouble convincing the client I'm working on site at to allow us to use ASP.NET 1.1 instead of classic ASP.

I had heard about the improved standards support in 2.0, thanks for the confirmation of that.

Atlas is interesting, but short of installing .NET 2.0 and running a sample web-app, I'm not sure how it does it's javascript side of things. I assume it's inline? I do all my javascript - including events - in external .js files ('unobtrusive javascript') - so if Atlas is going to clutter my xhtml, I'd rather stick to the Prototype ajax library.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a pessimist with the generated output of ASP.NET controls and such - and I think you understand why.

One thing I'd love to see in future versions of VS: currently, it ties your aspx and aspx.cs file together. I'd really like it to keep track of the page's own javascript and css files as well - it's rare I'm creating a page these days that doesn't have all four. Oh, and the ability to code macros in C#? Or is that already in VS2005?

  Karthik [03.06.06 09:44 AM]

Coming from the JSP/J2EE space, I recently picked up ASP.NET 1.1 to fill a developer role in one my companies projects.

I found ASP.NET to be a very rapid platform for development and VStudio 2003 a very clean IDE to work with. The platform seems fairly stable, but still seems a bit behind J2EE since we are not using a very strong ORM mapping similar to Hibernate or Rails. The Microsoft Enterprise Library provides a reasonable level of obstraction for XML datasets, but our implementation still relies heavily on stored procedures for data encapsulation. This, inevitably reduces the speed at which we can develop our solution as well as effecting its overall maintainability.

I haven't worked much with ASP.NET 2.0 (aside for playing with the IDE) so I can't comment much on some of the new language level features, but it does look pretty promising. VS 2005 is an even slicker IDE.

We are beginning to see the reduction of Java's marketshare as people turn to ASP.NET in the enterprise space and PHP in the enthusiast/web site space. I think both will retain a niche market share for some time before ROR really begins to shake things up in the next year or two.

I think it is likely that we will see the market shift from .NET vs J2EE to .NET vs Ruby vs PHP sometime in the next 5 years. However, I wonder if .NET is different enough from J2EE be a worthy competitor to the next gen languages like PHP/Ruby.

  Brian Goldfab [03.06.06 03:06 PM]

Pat: i think you really should give Atlas a shot -- I think you will be impressed, but I appreciate your skepticism, and all I can ask is to give it a run -- wait until late March so you can get the March CTP and the new updated content to help.

As to your comments/feedback -- I went back to the prodcut teams and got some answers.

1) I spoke with people on the Web tooling team and visual studio core team -- they understood the feedback and had some good thinking, but asked me to share this resonse (verbatim cuz I'm lazy)

"We can certainly see the value of this User Experience enhancement to the Solution Explorer for managing Javascript artifacts associated with a specific aspx file. However, it’s hard to say how well this would scale out for scenarios involving other file types (like images, for example). It seems like the best option, actually, would be to give you control over which artifacts you would want to ‘hide’ underneath a file. This way, you could decide on a case-by-case basis which of your associated development artifacts should be subnodes of a particular aspx file. Ultimately, you know best how Visual Studio should structure your web project.

We can certainly consider a feature like this for a future version of Visual Studio. The best way to submit it is through the MSDN Product Feedback Center (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback) since that will ensure the bug is directly routed to the correct product group, and will allow you to monitor its status.


2) as for managed scripting, VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for Applications) will provide a managed scripting environment (VB.NET, etc.) for doing macros and such -- details are sparse, but you can find them. I believe it ships with the next version of VS, but I'm not an expert there.

Hope this helps.

  Pat Allan [03.06.06 07:26 PM]

Brian, thanks for the effort you've gone to in seeking answers, it's appreciated.

I'll definitely give Atlas a shot, and I might just send some feedback your way via the contact form on your own blog.

Regarding the features I want, once I've got stuck into VS2005, I'll see whether that will do, otherwise I'll use the link you've provided.

  Jon [03.06.06 11:07 PM]

One of Silicon Valley's dirty little secrets- if ASP.NET were not from Microsoft, it would be the hottest thing in Silicon Valley since Java. (I'm quoting some respected people in the open source world.)

In fact, the Microsoft baggage has failed to slow down .NET in the Web 2.0 space. Tagworld, Foldera, and another half dozen accomplished start-ups are blazing away on .NET. You might be suprised to see that some of these companies have relatively small development teams given the scope and depth of their products.

You may not like Microsoft but face it- .NET rocks.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.07.06 03:28 PM]

Allen Noren, who runs ecommerce at oreilly.com, just sent me the following tidbit that is also relevant to this thread: "I've observed that .Net is often our largest single category in terms of sales activity through oreilly.com, eclipsed only by 'Other Technical,' a catchall for all kinds of books."

He's right. That's a surprise! In February, our direct.Net-related book sales were 35% higher than our sales of Java books, and 89% higher than our sales of Linux books!

I note that the unexpectedly high ratio in direct sales might be driven in part by the suprising lack of support that .Net has gotten from retail bookstores. They decided early on that .Net was not going to fly, cut back their inventory levels, and have failed to pay attention as the .Net market has heated up over the past couple of years.

  Keith J. Farmer [03.07.06 09:15 PM]

Just wait until we start getting those ASP.NET + Linq stories together. It's a very exciting time to start working at Microsoft. :)

Pat: If it'd help, you can show off the fact that some of the world's largest (and arguably, some of the most data- and security-critical) websites run on .NET. Microsoft.com, of course, the London Stock Exchange, Experian, etc. The fact that they work well isn't something that can be pawned off as cooking the results.

  Tim Almond [03.14.06 04:54 AM]

Tim,


As someone who's done both, I suggest that ASP.NET is growing in areas that are more "application" than "website" like ASPs and intranets. If someone asked me to add some straightforward functionality to their corporate site, I'd generally not go for .net. But when it's a site with lots of parties taking part in a process with lower traffic, and less about presentation, I'd opt for it.


It may also be that a lot of companies are deciding that with the end of VB6, they are moving towards .net, and that's where you are seeing sales.


Are sales about asp.net, or .net in general. I'm wondering if you are seeing the trend I'm seeing - that companies aren't building desktop apps, but going straight to browser.

  Tim O'Reilly [03.14.06 08:57 AM]

Tim Almond -- Yes, I definitely see the trend of going straight to the browser. Almost all of the most interesting apps today are browser based -- or at the very least, if not browser based (like iTunes) treat the local application as part of a larger system that includes a web back end.

  Victor [03.21.06 08:19 AM]

BTW, can Atlas with ASP.NET 2.0 run on Apache?

Thanks

  nilesh [03.22.06 02:50 PM]

Lets see, PHP = Free, ASP.NET = Price.

So lets see do a simple serach on the interne for learing PHP , many free Books for php and free resource tons more then ASP.NET.

ASP.NET help is hard to find on net, vs. PHP.

so yes book sales should be up with asp, because PHP users are getting to learn it for free. well asp users keep paying and paying to keep up.

just my side on that, any one agree here?

  lifebalance [05.03.06 06:46 PM]

The increase in ASP.net books is also related to the fact that ASP is the defacto standard in most academic requirements in post-graduate programs in India, which graduate 10,000s of students every year.

  Tim O'Reilly [05.04.06 06:44 AM]

lifebalance -- that's an interesting piece of data! However, I don't think that it is reflected in these figures, which are for the US market only. Given what you say, the ASP.net market is even stronger than I suggested.

nilesh -- I'm sure that the existence of lots of free books may depress the PHP book market. But don't discount the huge amount of information Microsoft makes available to its developers via MSDN as a competitor on the other side. But even if the factor you suggest were the case, the fact remains that PHP book sales, however large, are in decline, while ASP book sales are on the increase. The post wasn't driven by the absolute size of the market for each, but by the rate of change. Unless there's been a recent wave of NEW free documentation, the book data remains suggestive.

  Rick Houlihan [06.21.06 08:38 AM]

I have always been the type of developer who uses whatever technology that allows me to be as productive as possible. I am a J2EE architect with senior level .Net skills as well. I am intimately familiar with Java SDO and JSP as well as ADO.NET and ASP.NET architectures, and have implemented complex application frameworks in both environments.

As an architect for IBM in the STG group at Austin my current project is J2EE/JSP based. In previous roles I have functioned in the same capacity leading .Net development teams as well.

As a result I am in a fairly unique position to comment on the advantages and drawbacks of these two platforms. In short, anyone who supports the J2EE "standard" without understanding the .Net framework or the CLR runtime is in my experience stating a religious opinion. Without actually using the tools there is no way to compare without relying on annecdotal information gathered second hand from people who have little or no understanding about one or the other platform.

Personally, I challenge any J2EE developer to produce a middleware application as quickly as is possible with .Net framework. There is absolutely no comparison between the level of productivity that is possible with Microsoft's .Net environment. The IDE is far superior to anything available in the J2EE space, the server is more reliable, the framework is based on a true standard that actually works, there are no issues with conflicting implementations, the developer documentation is far superior, and the tools are straight forward and mostly bug free.

.Net ADO is so far ahead of Java SDO it is not even funny. SDO is a cluged standard resulting from competing implementations that actually derive from multiple base types. Unmapped and Mapped SDO's are incompatible with each other, and the only ways to generate an SDO at runtime is to use a JDBC mediator with an active connection to a database or read in a serialized SDO from storage. Mapped SDO's cannot be modified at runtime in any way, and there is no way to merge data at runtime from multiple SDO's. Mapped SDO's are generated using convuluted tools that are not analagous to typical database access methodologies such as SQL. An SDO cannot represnt a JOIN of two tables unless a database VIEW is created and referenced in the creation of the SDO. The lack of these features are crippling.

On the other hand, ADO allows dynamic creation as well as modification of typed or untyped Datasets, supports merging of result sets, and allows true offline manipulation of ADO objects. There is no need for serialized instances or database connections to leverage ADO, and the core Dataset is far more extensible. ADO Datasets can be generated using a WYSIWIG designer or using common SQL through a data adapter connected to a database. Any possible result set can be represented in an ADO Dataset using complex SQL, eliminating the need to create a VIEW in the database for every single TABLE JOIN that may be needed by the application at runtime.

SDO was created to compete with ADO, unfortunately the architects of SDO had very little knowledge of the capabilities of ADO as they were typical J2EE bigots who believe they can do anything better than the boys in Redmond simply because they are not Microsoft.

JSP is a collection of disparate technologies loosely put under the same umbrella. Incompatible design tools plague the developer whenever new technologies are injected into an environment, and UI development is painful and slow. ASP.NET provides a set of common components that are fully integrated into the IDE, and tooling for third party component providers enables them to provide the same level of integration for their products. This allows for a rich and robust set of componentry to be leveraged by the .Net developer while guaranteeing compatibility of the environment.

.Net performance is unrivaled by J2EE environments. The common belief is that .Net does not scale, however, it is the JVM itself which does not scale. .Net framework 2.0 demonstrates linear scalability on multi-processor systems, however, J2EE sees little to no benefit as processor count increases. The overall cost/performance of .Net framework based application servers is an order of magnitude greater than J2EE, and when application development and maintenance costs are factored in the platform is a clear winner.

Personally, if the J2EE community ever pulls their act together I will happily change my opinion. Until then I will go with what works, and right now the clear choice is .Net.

  Kirill Yatsenko [09.05.06 09:42 AM]

I want to say, that I have been .NET software developer for two years. That was the only platform I was very skilled. Until some time, when I started creating Web applications, for my own, not for the company I worked purposes. I want to say that .NET is a real headache with support and hosting. The prices for hosting are greatly higher then Linux plans. If you want to use SQL Server, that will cost you more. Can you imagine modern application without a DB support? I can't.
ASP.NET is good for intranet applications. And if one wants to collaborate with other MS products. We all know, that we can develop ASP.NET application free of charge. You can you LITE studio applications, or even compile manually. However, the core idea of .NET technology is actually, in my opinion, Visual Studio. That is the chief violon in the orchestra. So, without studio, it would be PHP, but much worther.
Comunity is very important in our days. Certainly, there is a lot of .NET communities, but they will never beat open source. The last thing, which I want to mention here, is cross platform. .NET has nothing. And, people, Vista will not be new Windows 95.
ASP.NET is well promoted, if we consider the books only. MS spends real funds to promote their main development environment and the only product that is very successful.
In the end, you can build "beautiful" applications with .NET Framework, but does this worth that? What is the reason to use MS.NET for Windows business applications if you have Visual Basic 6.0, which suites best for this task? Will you build Game Engine with .NET. I'm sure you know the answer. I think, that this environment, and the books sales will grow, in order to be successful market enterprise, but not the developer's tool. We need to ask Google guys, because the could have such information, how many pages on the WEB (Web applications is the core idea of .NET Framework, according to the creators concept!) are running on .NET Framework? You like to play with .NET, but you will not run it as you portal solution. It just doesn't make sense.

P.S. If you want to crash my ideas, please, send me an email. The address you can take from the site's contact page. The reference is under my name.

  Rod [11.03.06 08:00 PM]

See this asp.net 2.0 code examples site: www.dotnetspace.com the information you need probably is here

  Carlos Hopson [11.16.06 10:08 PM]

William Styron, whose Holocaust novel Sophie's Choice became a film and an opera, has died, aged 81...

  Tom [04.05.07 11:43 AM]

Any chance we can get an update on the market share data? I'm curious to see what a year can do for a technology.

  Arif [05.30.07 12:08 AM]

Tim, do have newer statistics since 2/2006? It would be interesting to see sales for web application frameworks such as Spring, Tapestry, and JSF.

The comparison of ASP .NET with other technologies should be more detailed. For example, sales of books in the JSF or Struts category should be considered, in my openion, part of the JSP category. This is similar to considering sales of Ajax as part of JavaScript sales.

  Gurjinder Singh Brar [07.19.07 01:28 AM]

I could not get that which one is better; ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails??

  kelvin [08.08.07 06:17 AM]

Most of the doc for .NET from micrsoft are bad practices and looks like Hacks for me.

Don't follow those sample code,

always use nHibernate for ORM in real project instead of the ADO.NET

We always build a 3 tier site using .NET, which share some MVC concept with ruby on rails:

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