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You accuse Terry of sweeping statements without facts and then go on to say if you do Windows then you should automatically assume ".NET is the logical choice"...
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Two points. First, Terry made a sweeping statement that people who are .NET advocates - tend to be anti-Linux - all without qualification. I - being a .NET advocate - took exception to that statement and responded. Second, .NET is tailored to Windows development - so yes - it makes .NET the logical choice for Windows-based development. Is it the only choice? No - but it is the logical first choice.

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But think about this a minute. If you are looking at web apps with the potential to host on Linux AND Windows, then PHP with MySQL backend maybe the optimal choice.
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Good point. But the big push by guys like Whil is Linux on the desktop - which pretty much makes the server stuff irrelevant.

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The combination provides a developer to almost seemlessly work across Windows and Linux platforms for web applications. Not something you can say with .NET.
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Again, good point..But...there are trade-offs by "genericizing" your development toolkit. You can't take full advantage of the platform - at least not as easily as you could with a toolset that is geared toward that platform. It is much the same argument for not wanting to be 100% database transparent.


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John I know you think anyone who uses anything but .NET on Windows is a fool.
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Quite a leap in Logic here.... I think this is an unreasonable inference on your part.

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I can tell you from personel experience building a web framework in .NET that it's not an easy system to work with inexperienced web developers and HTML coders.
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Several years ago I wrote a web framework in ASP that allows HTML developers to easily put dynamic content on their web site. These developers don't know ASP; but with a few minutes of training they can paste simple pre-written ASP code and update properties. Here is an example:
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>About a year ago I worked hard to move this framework to .NET. So why is it still in ASP??? Because the .NET development platform proved more difficult in working with developers that only know HTML or even use Frontpage or other HTML editors.
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>Believe me I tried hard to create a simple methodology for them but it was clear after several weeks that while I could make a great .NET framework that I could use, it would be a lot tougher to make a .NET framework for someone that doesn't know .NET. Teaching them .NET is not an option at all because these sites are maintained without my involvement. I have no control over what pages they make and I have no control over what they learn.
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>Without getting into all the technical hurdles I encountered, one big one was that .NET's form handling is fairly rigid when it is faced with unknown outside content. So HTML developers building their own forms on the page can create conflicts with forms in the .NET framework. This got even more complicated when forms from outside advertisers could show up on a site as well. After lots of testing and research I had some potential workarounds but nothing that would be as simple for the HTML developers than the ASP framework we use now.
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>Also if you look at www.dietfacts.com you will see the framework used by an experienced ASP developer who hooked in her own database and rather complex ASP code. She was also involved with me in trying to build the .NET framework. What we learned was that making a .NET framework useable for people who don't know .NET would at the same time sacrafice flexibility for those that do. When all was said and done, ASP still offered a better balance between cut and paste usability for HTML developers and flexibility for people that do know ASP.
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>If you can come up with a methodology in .NET that can match the simplicity of the ASP code snippets I showed you above, allows HTML users to make new pages, forms, and add any content they want to those pages without losing the main advantages of .NET in the process, I'd LOVE to hear it!
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>Dont get me wrong, I'm confident there is a way to do it and do it right. But every time I was close to creating a framework methodology there was at least one snag that would make it more complicated for the HTML guys than the ASP solution.
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>AT LEAST you should also be able to tell from this post that I'm not married to VFP for every project.
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So your argument is that because your ASP code did not port cleanly to ASP .NET - you are discounting .NET????? I for one see .NET is simplifying web apps - not complicating it. With ASP, you did not have a good toolset to work with. That is not true with .NET. Reading your post - it appears you are making the opposite argument that most make.