Is ASP.NET Too Hard?

By: Scott

On a listserv I'm on some folks were discussing the adoption rate of ASP.NET compared to other server-side Web programming technologies. Someone mentioned that they had read that there were more new projects being started with classic ASP than with ASP.NET. Even though ASP.NET has been out for several years, more developers are still using classic ASP, and not just for maintaining old projects, but for starting new ones too! Why is this? I can only think of two reasons:

- Said employee's company has not yet adopted .NET.
- Said employee finds ASP.NET over his or her head.

Hardly a week goes by where I don't receive at least one email from a 4Guys reader or from a reader of one of my books that goes something like: “I am having trouble doing X in ASP.NET. This was so easy in classic ASP!!” This begs the question: is ASP.NET too hard?

Part of classic ASP's appeal was that non-programmers could quickly pick it up and start using it. The concepts behind ASP were simple enough - procedural programming in an English-like syntax (VBScript). Where things got more tricky - like needing to connect to a database, read a text file, use a regular expression, etc. - there was always a plethora of code samples available online, and since ASP pages were simple text files, one could just cut and paste the script into their page and give it a whirl.

ASP.NET is a different beast altogether. It's object-oriented. It's compiled. While it is possible to develop using Notepad, it's not easy. Trying out new source code is not as easy as cut and paste. Sure, Visual Studio .NET makes many facets of Web application development a breeze. Need to display data on a page? Simply drag a DataGrid onto the Designer, and then a connection object; set some properties through VS.NET's GUI, and you're done. Trouble is, if you want to deviate from the path the GUI tools provide, you have to write code. And ASP.NET code, to the non-programmer, may seem backwards and confusing. For example, consider the following: you are displaying monthly sales data in a Web page and want to make the background color of the month's data red if the sales goal for that month was not met. In classic ASP, you can see where your HTML table is built up, and non-programmers can intuitively reason the precise location where such a check must go. In ASP.NET, you need to know that the DataGrid has an ItemDataBound event that fires for each item added to the DataGrid. For someone whose background is not in computer science, the notion of creating an event handler may be foreign.

Now I'm not decrying ASP.NET in favor of classic ASP. The last classic ASP page I created was back in 2000, and I don't plan on ever doing classic ASP again. I love ASP.NET, but I have a computer science background. I've talked to folks who lack the background, or who work with people who lack the background, and they notice just how much trouble these people have transitioning from ASP to ASP.NET. Part of the power of ASP (and Visual Basic) was that it empowered non-programmers to create computer solutions, but .NET has raised the entry-level, for better or for worse.

So what does the future bode for these non-programmers? Do they migrate from programming to some other task? Keep doing classic ASP / Visual Basic? Start using .NET once the tools become so advanced that virtually no code has to be written by the so-called “developer?”