Re:ASP.NET You're doing it Wrong. An Introduction to Nancy
by graycat on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @02:11PM
(#6252246)
I don't think I'm using WebForms. If so,
then so far I'm not doing anything clunky.
E.g., I'm not using anything like a
calendar control.
> presenting me with hundreds of different knobs about which I don't want to learn
I certainly haven't been using lots of such knobs. Nearly everything I do in VB.NET and ASP.NET is obviously quite close to really simple HTML and CSS.
As far as I can tell, C# and VB.NET are equivalent ways, different essentially only in syntactic sugar, to get to the basic .NET classes and common language runtime (CLR). C# seems to want to borrow from the especially succinct syntax of C/C++ which I don't like. I prefer the more verbose syntax from the history of Fortran, Basic, PL/I, etc.
That said, I love C#, I like ASP.NET MVC, and I absolutely loathe WebForms and VB.NET. Everything about those technologies feels clunky and wrong-headed to me, as if I have been forced to run a race with my arms strapped to my sides. Having learned about HTTP, HTML, and core JavaScript a long time ago, WebForms seems an awkward, highly annoying abstraction that hides the knobs I want to turn while presenting me with hundreds of different knobs about which I don't want to learn.
While not quite so bad, the syntax of VB.NET fills me with unease... everything seems cleaner, clearer, smarter in C#. VB.NET shouts "the author of this code doesn't really like to write code" in the same way that a Prius announces "the owner of this car doesn't like motorsports."