What are all the WebForms devs using now?

Question

Hello folks, new here, first post...

For somebody who began their programming journey working with VB6 and moved from there to VB.NET, VBA, then C# and who is mostly familiar with the drag-and-drop style of design that was offered by the likes of the VB6 IDE, VBA Editors, WinForms, and WebForms, what are my options in the modern ASP.NET landscape?

I have an upcoming project that will need to be browser based and even though I am familiar with WebForms development I would like to avoid building a greenfield application using something that for all intents and purposes is dying.

What I would like to know is, what have all the old WebForms developers moved on to now? And what order should I take in learning these new technologies?

Are there any highly recommended books or other learning materials that I should invest my time in?

Answer 1

Hi @Miles Williams ,
Now,most people learn javascript,jquery and ajax.They're more populate. And you could learn some controls.

Best regards,
Yijing Sun

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Answer 2

For server based web applications .net core razor pages is the recommended replacement. They even added vb.net support, though it will always be a second class citizen.

Blazor is an interesting technology for webforms developers as it uses a component model rather than a template model like razor pages. Blazor is receiving more support than I would have guessed.

The other common approach is to switch to a client framework like react, vue or angular. But client frameworks evolve much faster than server technologies.

I started with webforms, but switched to mvc as soon as it was released. Now I use react and webapi.

Answer 3

In the menu along the top of this page click on Learn. Search for ASP.Net and whatever other terms you want. That will likely help you find what Microsoft is currently pushing.

Answer 4

Well, of course dropping webforms and MVC is what the standard is right now. But this has a significant cost increase. And when you do that, then less sites can and will be built for that given money in the marketplace.

This is kind of like WinForms vs WPF. Sure you get a MUCH nicer and newer UI set of controls and formatting, but again at a significant cost.

So, we talking about increasing costs of development. I mean, if you increase the cost of butter, then you see the consumption of margarine or other spreads now go up.

As for the lack of drag + drop? There is a REAL challenge here, since we all know that the web form designer "makes a good effort", but can't really render things all that well. and the reason of course is that the browser technology is moving VERY fast!!

And we see another reason for the "lack" of a visual designer for web stuff. The simple matter all the schools, web courses, examples, and developers? Well, they NOW grew up in web land. That means that they just keep a copy of the browser open, hit ctrl-s to save their markup, and then refresh the browser. In a way, we ALWAYS would say tweak a windows form, play with it in the designer, but often 100's of times per day, we would ALSO run the code to see the results.

At the time when webforms came out 99% of developers were from desktop land. But, today, it is 100% the opposite!!!

in other words, duel monitors, keeping a copy of the browser running, and seeing the changes occur is now done by simple keeping that browser running during development. Microsoft simple had to follow the lead of EVERYONE else. Since all new developers today work that way, then so does VS for web development.

In a way, this is not a whole lot different when we transitioned from green screen applications to windows. (and a LOT of developers simple did not change, and did not jump on, or grasp say event driven type of coding - they in fact left the industry).

So, in a way, the march (if not a stampede) to using the browser for seeing the "results" of what you doing is quite much how everyone works. (except for the us that came from say a windows desktop dev paradigm - drag + drop controls, into a designer, see the results.

In a way, webForms were BRILLENT in that they created and allowed that whole generation of winforms developers to EASY jump to webforms. In fact, had they not done this, I think .net would have died!!!

Same goes for now MVC. Since VERY few come from desktop land? Then they all been and are working with a browser open, and thus that's how they see what they done. As a result, then most developers don't miss GUI based designers for the web.

However, they are still VERY wrong in IMHO.

Right now, what do we see occurring in the market?

Look at the latest hub-bub in Visual Studio? You see hot-code loads, and again near instant updates to the web browser screen from your source code! In other words, the efforts ARE going into reducing that effort by developers to SEE what they JUST did!!!!

Look at earlier Android systems, and they did not have a nice active design view/pallet like a form. NOW they DO!!!

What do all these new fancy pants development tools do now?

Why of course they are attempting to give a webforms, or winforms like development experience. In other words, this way of working WILL WIN in the marketplace.

The other issue was webforms were brilliant in terms of up-date panels. You can do partial page post-backs and NOT have to start coding out ajax calls.
(And look at what Blazor does + did to achieve this - signalR they used).

Again, proof of the idea that to update JUST part of the web page was a VERY valuable concept that update panels solved. Now update panels are often "maligned' by so many, but again, it came down to LOWERING the cost of development, and not having to implement javaScript + aJax calls to achieve these partial updates. And I dare say, that's what Blazor also does!!! (updates only part of the browser with great ease).

Again, this is a cost of development issue. I think update panels should return, and it is the developer cost issue here.

Anyway, back to the visual design choice?

So, in a way the industry is turning back towards a UI system that allows the developer to see their changes in near real time - exactly what we had all along with webforms!!

I think the direction is moving back in our favor. And in fact a palette of controls based on bootstrap or fancy css controls should be the default. Just pick what you want - kind of like shopping!

So, things are getting better, and in a funny way, moving back towards a visual feedback type of design process.

I do like the concept of blazer VERY much, but that means MVC + blazer, and it means not using vb code.

I like blazer since it has the potential to fix the beyond crazy issue of having more and more client side js code bloat up the browser, and a every crazy circle of increasing library of jQuery, jQuery.UI, jQuery.Toast (and on for 100 pages more here!!). This silly trend has to stop like right now!!!

the idea that every time I need some new widget or feature, we now find + adopt + inject MORE client side js code? And now just one more js library? Nope, it fraying like a bad rope about to break as it stands now.

I don't have a good answer, except that by the time I really drop webforms, the tools will have reached the point in which the increased costs of MVC + blazer will have lowered to a point in which the cost difference is not too high, and the benefits outweigh that additonal costs of development.

However, it don't matter what business you have, you simple can't increasing the cost of "one thing" you consume - and that includes cost of web software development.

So, I can only suggest that MVC + blazer + c# is quite much the only choice we have with Visual Studio. It a choice that is improving as I write this.

And, I see that trends are moving towards visual designers again, and that's also a good and warm fuzzy feeling - since that's where most of us started from!

Answer 5

Thanks Albert, what you've said here confirms my own suspicions and observations. Being primarily a desktop developer I am not thoroughly versed in Web development, to be honest, it seems to be a huge unwieldy beast that is only going to become harder and harder to tame if the prevailing programming paradigms continue to dominate the industry. For instance, the shakiness of building upon a foundation of dependencies on libraries and frameworks that themselves are built on other frameworks and libraries, it reminds me of what has happened with modern operating systems and the 30 million LOC problem, and that, to me, is frightening.

So, to the point, MVC and Blazor you think is what I should be looking at? I am familiar with MVC as it is far from a new concept, however, I am not very familiar with ASP.NET MVC, I have played around in it before and what I don't like about it, much the same as WPF and MVVM, is that there is just too much magic going on, I can't just start up a new MVC application and follow through in the code, seeing and understanding what is happening. This is my main problem with frameworks and coding by convention in general, there are just so many things going on behind the scenes just by naming something appropriately it just magically works...

I'm the kind of person who just needs to know what is going on, I have to understand it in its entirety (or at least up to a certain level of abstraction). So, what I need is a set of books or some kind of learning material that will explain everything that is going on with the ASP.NET MVC framework and Blazor. I can't just work with tutorials that simply provide the code to get up and running and not provide any context or understanding of what that code is doing or dig down into the internals of the system.

So, any thoughts on learning materials for MVC and Blazor?

This means I need to get familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript again doesn't it? I really dislike JavaScript in many ways, I find it to be such an ugly language, and popular coding conventions seem to encourage the ugliness..