I recently interviewed a friend of mine who switched from PHP to .NET as per client’s requirement. It’s funny since amongst my friends this is the first case when someone has moved to M$ technology from some Open Source technology. I was curious and in order to sort it out I interviewed him. Here are his responses as he put them.

Q. Tell me about the usability of .NET framework and the development environment.

Ans: Considering the usability factor .NET framework and development environment is “all right”. Drag and drop makes easy for programmer and less programming is needed. However for a power developers, limited control over modification is provided which makes us difficult to program.

Q. How is the performance of .NET framework in comparison to previous frameworks you used?

Ans: I was frustrated with the performance of the framework. Development tools require a lot of disk space and hog up a lots of CPU degrading the performance of web applications. The performance was not satisfactory even after development. Page loading was slow during first phase of execution and even “Time Out” errors appeared when programs were large.

Q. You are a designer too. How easy was the designing part?

Ans: The design part was the easiest compared to other frameworks I have used. CSS implementation was quite easy. But for new developers I recommend trying other frameworks as the design part maybe quite confusing.

Q. Would you like to share other issues you have faced?

Ans: The major issue I faced was incompatibility. While switching from Professional version of Developement Environment to Express edition I got error messages saying “Unexpected Error”. The error were not helpful and I had to spend 3-4 days figuring out what was wrong with the code.

Even when I moved the program from my development environment to deployment web server, various issues bothered me due to the change in .NET Framework version. .NET is not that mature and in the phase of development the issue of backward compatibility has not been taken care of.

Conclusion

Now to the part I love the most, the conclusion. PHP has been accused of being the most unstable framework across the globe. So are other Open Source frameworks. But with my latest interview with the recently shifted .NET developer, I figured out that .NET is the one which is out of the league considering instability. The incompatibility issues make it the worst among all the web development frameworks. M$’s slogan for Visual Studio was something like “Have a smooth start”, however the experience of the young programmer doesn’t indicate so. He even recommends starters not to start development with Visual Studio Development Environment.

Now the main point of argument, why are companies like Godaddy and many others are moving to M$’s technologies leaving Open Source technologies? The mystery behind it lies in the NDA between those companies and M$ while we in the mist can only speculate one possibility that a huge company like M$ might have threatened them to do so for violating some of its patents that it has preserved in the patent shelves.

Thank you for reading. Hope to write again soon.  Don’t forget to jolt down a comment or few as it is so boring we don’t have anyone to pat or stab on the back. Any of the previously mentioned action in appreciable. We fight for revolution.

Peace mates.