rnbennett

You assume too much - disappointing. I was in the .NET world for 12-13 years and worked for MS at one point. I was hardly being 'forced' to use it - instead I was regularly brought in to come in and fix / re-architect others' awful messes.

We both know it's not right to load 34 projects into a solution. It's not something I'd ever do, but it's done by many. I saw it commonly in my clients. My last .NET project I took on about 18 months ago, my client had a Classic ASP/2.0/3.5 chimaera with 50+ solutions, each with up to 40 projects in each. DataSets calling SQL Server stored procs for a data layer. The build process took almost an hour.

It's common unfortunately. Big enterprise, old platform, cluster of code. I stopped using .NET because those enterprises have no desire to fix it.

That's what I get for being cheap. :)

It's kinda what I get for running Wordpress on Linode. I'll have to checkout AWS.

Irony Indeed! Never see traffic like this usually.

While I've been out of the .NET game for a year or so, I'm aware of the ecosystem. There's a lot of great libraries out there, that make the experience considerably better.

Companies on the Microsoft stack tend to be extremely conservative. I hardly ever see anyone using these ORMs - I see LINQ-to-SQL or EF, or just as often, inline SQL using DataSets in codebehinds.

I don't think that companies should immediately jump on the next great technology, however there are plenty of companies sitting around on WebForms based on .NET 2.0 (2005) and .NET 3.5 (2007), and a few still on .NET 1.1 (2003). The only reason these companies have not moved onto ASP.NET MVC (or anything else) is because of the sheer cost of doing so. With that comes all of the negatives discussed in the post.

To clarify - I'm not putting down a technology from 2002 per se. I'm putting down the fact that, in my experience, the vast majority of organizations are using that technology originating in 2002. Organizations generally have not seen ROI from the stack that promises "the best TCO" and are leery of upgrading the platform because that break even point has never occurred.

While ASP.NET MVC is a huge improvement, my experience in .NET over 12-13 years has shown that most enterprise-class organizations built monolithic Web Forms apps 5-6 years ago. Upgrading these apps - especially to ASP.NET MVC - are cost prohibitive from both a licensing cost perspective and and labor perspective. When work with prospective clients today, it's almost always a situation where A) the client wants to shoehorn their favorite JavaScript MVC framework their WebForms app or B) They have functionality that is part MVC, part WebForms, and they are stuck in a corner. either way, it's always a monster mess that enterprises generally decide costs too much to clean up.

Unfortunately because I'm cheap and I am using the smallest Linode plan available. Don't normally get this kind of traffic...