It is not a thing I am proud of and I might lose some very good friends saying this, but I went to an ASP .Net 2.0 event. Yes, Microsoft is cruising through Europe showing off their latest development on their much beloved/hated ASP. I am not sure their brainwashing technique had any effect though. You tell me:

I myself am no great fan, having used and still using ASP 1.1 for some small projects at work, purely work mind you! But since the Internet is “hype” even in the world of capitalism, everyone is developing for the web and abandoning the Win32 world. Seeing as how much crap 1.1 is, it is nice to know that 2.0 will bring some very nice improvements, making working with it much less of a hassle and almost 50% as fun as PHP.

There are some very nice improvements in the Visual Studio GUI, mostly rip-offs from Macromedia Dreamweaver, but hey, they would not be shipping Windows if that was not their habit. The ability to just drag and drop complete login/logout modules will come as a gift from god for some people, saving money and time, others will hate more of this prefab code. I guess I am in between. I will never use it for my own websites (nor will I use any ASP), but at work, well, it is certainly going to speed up things.

ASP is getting a lot better though, meaning it’s all starting to look more like PHP. There are still a lot of postbacks and other uncontrolable background events happening, so you will still be coding a lot of Javascript to lessen the load on your server. And although I noticed some CSS again, they are still not following complete standards and are introducing something called “Themes”. I am guessing and hoping the basis is CSS, but it still looks awkward.

In short, it was a fun free event, with free food and drinks, and a free t-shirt. Which I will not wear too much though, unless I want the crap beaten out of me by certain friends.