PHP missing ASP.Net Web Forms »

December 14, 2008

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Lately, I have been seeing too many articles comparing PHP and ASP.Net. Initially, I brushed them off, as I was too confident (over confident?) that my choice of PHP and mySQL combination is the right one. Even today, it probably is. But what has been bothering me is the fact, that I did not give ASP.Net a fair chance. I did not even try to “play” around with it. But again, few years back, there was no free version of Visual Studio available. But today, Microsoft has many express editions available. For ASP.Net, we can try Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition, which is available here.

Why do I want to try it out, in the first place? PHP has been good for me in the last 4+ years and now with cool frameworks, like Code Igniter and Cake, coding has been more easy and streamlined. But what really is missing is the ease with which .Net Framework allows you to create UI components, like data grids. I am not sure why we don’t have a good UI based frameworks for PHP. I know there are separate products available on the net, but imagine the ease and the efficiency, if we had one great free tool, using which we can just drag an drop and associate a query/ stored proc. On the Java front, JSF is probably comparable with .Net Web Forms. I am not sure if Django, RoR and others provide or not, but I don’t see a robust PHP framework with Web Forms like feature yet.

I did not work on ASP.Net yet, but I am going to try it out in this week. Hopefully, it will change my opinion on Microsoft for the better!