Which do you preffer? What are the strengths and weaknesses of either one? What are some common tasks that can be acheived by both but you preffer to use one or the other and why?

.NET without a doubt.

One of the things I love about .NET is that it handles all the repetative boring stuff for you. Take validation for example, all you need to do to is drop in a Validation control and assign it to a form element and ASP.NET handles both the server and client side validation for you. All you have to do is set the attributes...

Then there's Viewstate - ASP.NET will automatically maintain the values of the controls on your web form for you. It's versitile and you can disable it per control if you need to.

Automatic validation for malicios code is usefull. This is something that I bet a million web designers don't do... imagine having a simple guestbook script. It simply drops the form text box contents into the database, and outputs it back to the page when you view the guestbook. You could sign the guestbook and drop some code in the (for example, a bit og JavaScript redirecting the user somewhere else, or a popup advert, or whatever.) ASP.NET protects against this by default and can be turned off if need be.

The fact that it's a compiled language and also that you can utilise output cacheing till the cows come home makes it blindingly fast.

The code is far more stuctured. Instead of mixing PHP code in with your HTML (like you used to with ASP), with ASP.NET, you simply put your controls on the form, in place of (or as well as) form elements, and the code goes either at the top of the page or in a seperate file.

With PHP, if you don't like the language, you're stuffed. With ASP.NET, you can choose the language you code in.

It's a lot easier to get proper support on it, direct from the people who made it. You can also get properly trained and acredited in ASP.NET.

It's a lot more attractive to companies (usually larger companies and higher paid jobs) to have ASP.NET on your CV than PHP. The other thing is that everybody seems to be learning PHP these days, Microsoft developers are getting rarer and more sought after by companies who stick with Microsoft technologies. (i.e. the company I work for, we're a Microsoft partner and have a number of Microsoft Certified people working for us)

BLAAAH... .NET for apps ok... But for WebDev.... PHP all the way


Only thing you get that you can NEVER get with PHP is support from a Microsoft type Staff..

But then again.. Since they break everything they should help fix it.. where as PHP..... JUST WORKS

Only thing you get that you can NEVER get with PHP is support from a Microsoft type Staff..

Whats your point? Ofcourse they wouldn't, if you were in their shoes would you?

But then again.. Since they break everything they should help fix it.. where as PHP..... JUST WORKS

I'm really looking for more intelligent arguments than that.

I sit dang near right on the fence on this one. PHP was the first language that I was ever profficient with and I really love it. I know how to use it better than the .NET framework however the .NET framework is very stable and offers a much more vast library, plus it's 100% object oriented whereas PHP is a language built upon a wholy procedural language (c) and yet they are trying to make it more object oriented, this to me just seems assanine(sp?).

"plus it's 100% object oriented whereas PHP is a language built upon a wholy procedural language (c) "

Which i find to be a complete overkill.

You create an ASP button its an object, we only want to submit the page.

.NET is pretty cool, but you can acheive the same thing in PHP (even better in php5), xml rpc soap etc all can be coded in PHP and result in the same thing.

What i really hate though is .NET folks telling me its already there for you to use.

Like form validation for instace.

I have my own library that takes care of this thing which can be simply included and used in any PHP application. As for form input this too can be captured and cleaned etc before storage etc.

With .NET this kind of need to know stuff is completely taken away from the programmer making his lfe much easier on one hand while at the same time abstracting away whats going on at a lower level (in my eyes making him/ her an organ grinding monkey).

Been compiled does little to make it better, PHP can be fed into the ZEND accelerator and compiled (in a sense). Sure compiled languages are always going to run faster but nothing can speed up that delay while waiting for the DB to return some results.

I have been using templates for quite some time and trust me I do not mix my XHTML with my PHP. Though for small projects .NET is an overkill at this where PHP excells.

PHP5 with its completely new OO interface can take on the other OO languages now (not to say it wasn't before like).

Support is always a big question.

With open source stuff you get a community of developers and users who can give bug reports etc on the fly asap, or if they are genious enough can actually fix the problem themselves then post a patch. Oh by the way did i say support was free.

NOT the case with Microsfot stuff though, this closed source group of folks are required to support their product because they are that tight they didnt release the source code. this is always going to be a massive argument for us all.

But hey both ways work.

I find that most new University leavers are running straight into .NET jobs thus the market is filling with half witts who know little about web engineering in general because they have a magic enviroment that pretty much does all they require at the click of a mouse. And come on my 5 year old can work windows as good as the next man.

Which is fantastic if your all RAD orientated and your code is not going to be scrutinzed.

30k plus for Linux sysadmin/ webmaster in my neck of the woods, you can also earn 30 quid an hour (or there abouts) going free lance.

If you want to be a serious .NET developer then like yourself you need to be in a company that has Microsoft at its heart. Its not cheap and we all know it.

What scares me about .NET the most is that it appears to be the latest craze in technologies coming from the Microsoft scene, CORBA and the likes were all hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, then came JAVA and the world went wild, now we have .NET everyone seems to hate JAVA and as for CORBA (whats that they say).

So you get the direction I'm heading I am sure.

In 5 years will .NET be the thing or more likely will it be a thing of the past.

All in all I have not missed the boat though.

About a year back I got into mono (linux) and started learning my c# etc. I have the xsp web server installed aswell as the mod_mono apache module and I can hack out my c#.net web pages to my hearts content.

The only problem I have is the learning curve (which is not coz I am daft but becuase .NET is no small thing and time is money for me).

All in all though I am php Linux through and through and yes you can throw in all those shell scripting things and c programnming too .NET probably started out written in C anyway mate (its the mother of all languages and you know it).

All in all I think there is little between them as webdev utilities just the usual Microsoft propoganda that everything they do is allways better. (even if .NET itself was open source). .NET and PHP can do the same things and no matter how much I get its built in thrown at me I shall always reply with yea I have libs that do that too (I.E mines built in too).

Its simply a case of anything you can do we can do too.

Ibbo

Its simply a case of anything you can do we can do too.

(Immitation being the finest form of flattery.)
I'm not gonna say this isn't true, but I have found that open source requires about 90% messing around, then 10% productivity. That's what it was like in my last company where they took on a complete open source approach. This isn't what managers want - they want 100% productivity, and with the likes of .NET, it's the closest you're going to get. Companies don't want somebody who can bang out millions of lines of PHP in a raw text editor and get something fancy looking, they want someone who can deliver results bang on time.

And that too can be done with php.

Like any good programemr we collect and add to our bag of tricks. I can turn up at a place and have a bare bones site up and running in no time. Sure it may have taken me months ney years to get it to this stage but that too is exactly what has happened with the .NET framework.

All you have to do in php is create the libraries and use them just like you would with .NET.

And with PHP you actually get a feel of what is going on, where .NET will mask all this away from you and turn you into the oragan grainder I used as an example earlier. But like you said its about getting the pages out there, never mind what your programmers are good and not too good at. Which to me is a shame for there is far more going on than simply coding a few pages.

I feel like your managers must be short of something, If they cannot plan and make an open source project meet a deadline then they should be using a click and drag tool to do it (they obviously need more time in production mate).

.NET is good but I shall leave it there.

ibbo