My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.
It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.
Of course, you don't have to use the magic of WebForms (as I'm sure you know). You can use it just like 'MVC' where the code-behind class definition is the controller. In fact, now that I think about it, the big difference is that the controller-view mapping is static in WebForms (with code-behind) and dynamic in MVC (method loads a view).
Isn't this true of any language? ActiveRecord associations in Ruby on Rails are brilliant for getting code out the door, but the queries it produces along with complex lazy loading can make a database melt.
My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.
Explain? Example? I don't see how this could possibly be true for .net but not for Rails or Python or PHP or whatever.
I think what noonespecial is probably getting at is that because .Net is usually written in Visual Studio a lot of people stick applications together in a RAD approach without giving much consideration for what is happening under the hood. Not all, of course, but probably a larger proportion that for platforms that don't have tools with RAD features like Visual Studio.
WebForms in ASP.Net are pretty much an attempt to take the developer experience of Visual Basic and make it work on the web - arguably with mixed results.
I really don't think there is anything wrong with .Net as a platform - but things like WebForms can be rather disturbing if not used with care.
It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.