[xab9]

Whenever Microsoft tried to do web frontend it was "not really good" (it was borderline catastrophic). Asp spaghetti, aspx components, viewstate handling, razor templates etc.

When I worked with .net guys (which happened quite often) 9 out of 10 had been like wow, I don't have to touch frontend, because MS will solve that for me "somehow", plus the frontend is messy and crap and javascript is a terrible language and C# rocks (but F# even rocks more) and I'm not going to learn all this sillyness (because I want to reuse my skills).

At least with new-angular they feel a bit better and they can praise typescript, because typescript is "just like C#". Let's just hope noone pulls an angular-one-to-two style rewrite/clusterfuck...

[pjmlp]

I have been jumping between native and web development, alongside backend since the late 90's.

I will take any server side rendering framework, with some sprinkle of JavaScript, over any SPA framework.

A node_modules directory with several thousand packages just for a basic CRUD app, really?

[dm3]

Clojurescript is quite nice in avoiding the whole webpack/npm/grunt/gulp/... build and dependency tooling evolution nonsense. There are a few other compile-to-javascript environments that are as good by now I suspect if you don't like parens as much.

However, I agree that server-side rendering is much simpler in all of the cases where desktop app-like experience isn't required.

[jgalentine007]

I have a very similar background and hate the idea of having a bunch of dependencies too - but I found my Vue pwa 'just works' even with 1007 folders in my node_modules directory. We'll see if it stands the test of time.

[manigandham]

It's a lack of any well designed standard library for JS, combined with weak namespacing and modules, as well as the rougher compilation step.

[dustingetz]

which yields better outcomes: organic growth (open source) or central planning (microsoft)?

[pjmlp]

Central planning for sure, given the lack of UI/UX focus we usually see on open source stacks.

Coding is fun, but providing a productive experience also requires doing lots of stuff that FOSS coders don't invest any resources into it.

[voltagex_]

I started professional web dev doing ASP.NET around the time of the ASP 2 to 4 transition. After looking at a Vue/Typescript/Webpack template that had 400 dependencies, give me User Components and ViewState any day.

[keithnz]

I was doing some work recently on an old asp.net app, and rather than rocking the boat, I just updated it with the existing webform / viewstate structure... which I haven't touched for years. Was weirdly smooth and easy to do things. There is some disadvantages to the approach... but there is definitely something kind of nice about the approach.

[thrower123]

It's so good that they brought it back as a first-class thing, see the newer Razor Pages stuff. I'd definitely use that for any kind of quick little internal applications, there's so much less ceremony involved.

[cm2187]

You are comparing 90s technologies to today's web standards. It's like saying that "open source isn't good for websites because look at php".

[eksemplar]

Microsoft front ends haven’t really changed since the 00s.

[jrs95]

Razor templates are quite good as far as server side templating goes imo

[czechdeveloper]

To me razor seems great, but I can only compare it with quite horrible HUGO templating.

[pknopf]

Blazor, to me, feels like WebForms/UpdatePanel.

WebForms/UpdatePanel was a half-baked solution to pick-up and drop-in .NET developers from WinForms to the web, while Blazor seems to do the same thing for server-side and client-side developers.

Microsoft eventually created MVC, which embraced the nature of the web (HTTP verbs, no viewstate, etc). I would urge developers to just dump into the deep end and use tech native to the browser. I know wasm is now native, but Blazor is running a VM in it that wasn't designed for it.

C# developers might find some comfort in TypeScript. Maybe Angular?

[recursive]

Wait, what's wrong with razor?