I have been playing with just about every form of web besides ASP. Net and Coldfusion.

Recently, I've really been kicking around taking things a step further by studying either of the two because it seems the larger more popular sites are either .asp or .cfm extensions.

My question is this:

Which framework would be more marketable as far as a career is concerned?

ASP .Net seems to produce pretty crappy code and Coldfusion costs more for both the software and the server to run it.

I don't think anyone has used Cold Fusion to make a new web site this century.

If you want a marketable career in web programming, I think ASP.NET is the only solution. My experience has been that there are far fewer PHP jobs available, all of them in smaller companies with limited technology budgets and limited technology needs.

I don't know what you mean about code quality? That's up to the person writing the code, after all.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

I don't think anyone has used Cold Fusion to make a new web site this century.

If you want a marketable career in web programming, I think ASP.NET is the only solution. My experience has been that there are far fewer PHP jobs available, all of them in smaller companies with limited technology budgets and limited technology needs.

I don't know what you mean about code quality? That's up to the person writing the code, after all.

Ditto. Go with ASP.NET as there is quite a big opportunity if you stick with that language. We pay our Senior Programmer 100K+ a year and the projects we put him on are mainly ASP.NET.

Visual Web Developer? 2005?

To make a good ASP.NET programmer, I'd recommend starting with C# (Visual Studio 2008, ideally) and writing class libraries only. You'll need to know collections, strongly typed data and casting, input output, and a host of other programming concepts, before applying them specifically to the web.

I've seen very good programmers with virtually no SQL knowledge write code to select from 2 tables, and then join them in memory. I've also seen people opt for arrays and for loops instead of hash tables. For programming as opposed to designing, I think this stuff is more important than the difference between a div and a span.

Besides, I think you already know that part, right?

I don't think anyone has used Cold Fusion to make a new web site this century.

Uhh.. that's and extreme comment and completely untrue. Cold Fusion definitely has some benefits, and is most definitely used today.

All that stuff about classes and libraries and such that John mentioned -- NOT necessary with CF. I learned CF when it was version 2.0 and still owned by Alliare. It was pretty easy to learn and get up to speed with, especially in comparison to ASP. ASP.NET does produce some UGLY code, it will still default to tables for everything - even when they aren't necessary.

You might want to take a crack at both of them, CF used to offer trials. Yes, it's more expensive, but CF will run on ANY platform - .NET will not.

I found this list of websites that use Coldfusion.

http://www.forta.com/CF/using/list.cfm?highlight=1

Ben Forta has been the CF Guru from the beginning. Definitely a GREAT resource.

This is too funny,

After posting this, I decided to look into both.

After installing ColdFusion 8, I got pretty excited. I quickly got the program up and running along with successfully setting up several databases through some tutorials I found. I then started looking into continuing my practice by uploading and working with Coldfusion and Dreamweaver only to find the two main servers I work with
a. either didn't support Colfusion 8 or
b. it would cost me upwards of $20.00 a month to host on one that did.

Screw that!

So...

I decided to give ASP.Net a whirl. I download the most recent Net Framework 3.5 required to work with the 08 releases of C#Visual Studio and I have been getting an error 2908 that wont allow me to install ANY Microsaft ASP software? I have been troubleshooting this issue for 2 days now. LOL!

Is this a sign?

Originally Posted by LadynRed

All that stuff about classes and libraries and such that John mentioned -- NOT necessary with CF.

If memory serves, this is the 2nd time I've disagreed with LadyNRed. It doesn't happen very often, but I'd suggest the reason for my disagreement is worth considering.

First, while using classes isn't necessary (you can go procedural instead of object oriented), knowing how computers process data is vitally important. It doesn't matter what language or coding style you use - some tasks simply can't be accomplished in ASP or PHP or CF without understanding those tasks and what they entail. Another way to put that would be that all Turing complete programming languages have exactly the same power, but express it in different ways. But the difference between integer and floating point division is fundamental across ASP.NET and Cold Fusion.

Less abstractly, ASP.NET lets you cache data if you want to, and you can do that at the session or application level. You don't have to do this at all, but you're able to! To argue that as a limitation or downside just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I'm guessing it's done because CF isn't able to act so flexibly, which strongly implies it can't scale anywhere near as well.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

ASP.NET does produce some UGLY code, it will still default to tables for everything - even when they aren't necessary.

This was true in ASP.NET v 1.0 and v.1.1 - the Server Controls used html tables for layout out of the box. It stopped being true in v 2.0. We're now up to v 3.5!

Of course, server controls are fairly garden variety. Most enterprises I've worked with tend to use controls that are more specific to their need. You can design a UserListRenderer once and use it throughout your application very easily, and you can tell it to render only div elements if you so choose.

But it has to be remembered that html is nothing but the display tier. Being a programmer and being a UI person are very different roles. It doesn't matter how semantically wonderful the display architecture is if the data is wrong, which gets us back to understanding computer based logic above all else.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

You might want to take a crack at both of them, CF used to offer trials. Yes, it's more expensive, but CF will run on ANY platform - .NET will not.

How do you figure? .NET prefers a Windows server, but will run on any server with Mono installed. But then the html will work on any computer with a web browser and even most mobile phones. That's the whole universal appeal of HTML, and how you don't need Notepad to look at a web page just because it was written in Notepad. Most companies willing to pay the salary you're presumably looking for in learning some new programming language, tend to maintain their own servers in house.

And the fact that 98 % of what you know from using XP every day applies to the computer that will run your code is a good thing.

Learningnoob, I always keep an open mind. What Lady had to say was just a suggestion and I took as just "her" opinion. You know what they say about opinions? Not bashing Lady but, we are all entitled to our own opinion. That's the beauty of being a human being

I practice listening to what many people say and put together what might work best for me then form my own opinion based on my findings and/or research.

ASP.Net VS2008 and Coldfusion 8 have their issues from what I have seen so far.

One of the problems is serving either and what hosting package supports either. I think there are so many different options these days in building dynamic websites it's almost confusing. There again, find what works best for you.

Sure I can download all of the things I need to run ASP.Net on my local server, spend hours and hours learning and testing only to find out I'll have to pay some ridiculous hosting costs to actually use what I create online.

Someone who was truly knowledgeable in the field would point the noob in the direction of creating dynamic content with software and links to hosting that actually accommodate the scripting language they recommend.

Anyone care to add information pertaining to this? It would greatly be appreciated.

I've seen both sides of the fence on this. I've never seen .NET 3.5 - we are stuck with 2.0 at work because the company simply takes FOREVER to upgrade, and - upgrades are expensive, we're a small group with a small budget.

I've used CF, it was easy to learn, fairly easy to set up, and it's very powerful. I have not seen that ease with .NET. I took a crack at learning .NET, it quickly became obvious to me that it was going to take a HUGE amount of work, and time, to even get marginally comfortable with it - and I decided I wasn't interested in going in that direction. I did programming for many years - I learned assembler and COBOL in college (among other now-arcane languages). Being a code cruncher in that manner is just NOT fun for me any more. We ALL speak from experiences we've had - yes, it's my opinion, but it's not just speculation either.

CF has it's problems, as does .NET - and hosting either is a challenge, since the marjority of hosts out there are linux-based systems. Windows hosting costs more - and lets face it Windows servers have issues .. it IS still MS we're talking about with their endless patches and vulnerabilities and instabilities. CF hosting is also expensive.. no matter what platform it runs on. I see either with it's challenges.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

I've seen both sides of the fence on this. I've never seen .NET 3.5 - we are stuck with 2.0 at work because the company simply takes FOREVER to upgrade

And you seem to feel that your company is unrepresentatively behind the curve in this area, right? In other words, because the company you work for is slow to upgrade (you said they're just now considering IE 7, or was it Office 2000?) doesn't mean that these modern tools are available to no one.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

I've used CF, it was easy to learn, fairly easy to set up, and it's very powerful. I have not seen that ease with .NET.

Again, complexity often translates to capability. A car is more complicated to operate than a skateboard, because the car has brakes.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Being a code cruncher in that manner is just NOT fun for me any more.

But I don't think the original question was "What job description does LadyNRed consider fun?" It's clear you love Cold Fusion, but your love doesn't mean CF is the best or even a valid solution for a lot of problems. Some it is, some it's not, but when all you have is a hammer, every problem doesn't suddenly become a nail.