Posted on: 12/9/2009 5:03:00 PM

      Currently there are a lot of people that use PHP for web development.  They love the fact that it is free, open source, allows for sloppy code, is easy to learn, and platform independent.  They also claim that PHP allows for more control than  ASP.NET.  As for their criticism of ASP.NET and Windows in general they claim that it is closed source, expensive, is hard to learn, doesn't allow for mistakes, only runs on windows servers, and offers little control over the page.
      I would have to say that all of these claims are but partial truths and some are just plain wrong.  Yes Windows is closed source and cost money.  Linux is free and open source.  However,  It is hard to find a computer that doesn't ship with Windows already installed.  This is important because many Linux users paid for the Windows already so why not use it.  As for development itself both PHP and ASP.NET offer free tools to use.  In particular when developing web sites on Windows you can use Visual Web Developer Express.  This FREE tool is perfect for developing web based applications.  As for hosting Windows offers Internet Information Services for free on both Vista and Windows 7 so their is no need to spend anymore money than if you were running Apache on a Linux server.  The only real place where I can see ASP.NET costing you more money is if you pay for hosting.  If that is the case then you will probably end up forking over a few extra dollars a month for Windows hosting over Linux hosting.
      As for the ease of learning the languages ASP.NET vs PHP, both are easy to learn.  PHP will allow for sloppier code, but ASP.NET is good at telling you exactly what is wrong with your code both during development and during compilation.  I would even have to go as far as to say that the strong typing of C# and ASP.NET make it easier to spot errors and maintain code.  I even prefer programing in C# and ASP.NET to programing in JavaScript (a very weakly typed language).
      I really can't see what PHP developers are talking about when they claim that PHP offers more control to the user than ASP.NET.  Yes ASP.NET does offer the developer a lot of sever controls that allow a great deal of functionality with minimal programing knowledge, but that is not all that ASP.NET offer the developer.  ASP.NET written in either C# or VB.NET allows the developer to make any html element into a server control. It then give the web developer access to the entire .NET class library to manipulate the web application.  With ASP.NET you get the best of both worlds easy to use server controls and the ability to fine tune you web based applications using C# or VB.NET.
      Finally if you just hate Windows and everything they stand for I understand you, but that is not an issue.  You can develop in ASP.NET and never even use a Windows computer.  Thanks to the Mono Project and the Mono Develop IDE you can write and run ASP.NET applications from Linux and Unix based Operating Systems to include Mac OS X.  That way you can stay off Window and still leverage the power of ASP.NET and C#.
      I know I sound like I love windows and am just to close minded to see the power of PHP and Linux, but then again I did write this blog from my laptop running openSUSE 11.2,  but for web development I just can't see using anything but ASP.NET.