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I have been working for 4 years as a PHP developer and I'm currently transferring to ASP.NET (Since I have 4 years of C# experience too, and selected PHP because of specific conditions - now I wish to use my C# knowledge and the .NET Framework is impressive).
When developing with PHP, I always use a framework - or something I've wrote myself (I'm working as a software architect...) or Zend Framework / Yii etc - the reasons is lack of classes, tools and OOP in PHP (such as MVC, ACL, Cache etc.)
When working with ASP.NET MVC 3, I see that combining the MVC framework and the general .NET framework I have many tools, and here is my point: when developing in ASP.NET, do you need to use any other framework than .NET? (just like in PHP I'm using Zend).
If so, there's any recommended frameworks?
Thanks! :)
In a .Net world, there are many options infront of you. see below popular vendors;
www.devexpress.com
www.telerik.com
www.comonentone.com
www.infragistics.com
But most of the time, asp.net is perfect itself. And when you are talking about mvc3. You can use another view engine instead of using Razor(the default one) such as spark. So, i mean that asp.net itself can be expended accroding to your needs.
And when you are working with mvc3, then you have best choice which entity framework. There is alot of support out there for this framework. So good luck in this.
Yes, there are other frameworks that you can choose to use alongside .NET MVC - but I myself haven't chosen to utilize them in any recent projects. Here are a few examples aside from what others have already pointed out:
http://www.springframework.net/
http://sparkviewengine.com/
That said, while I don't personally use frameworks like I mentioned above here in no particular order are a few tools that I have found that I have come to rely on while developing applications within ASP.net MVC:
Fluent Nhibernate - If you choose to use Nhibernate as your ORM
Ninject - Dependency Injector
AutoMapper - object - object mapper
ELMAH - error logging facility
lg4net - logging etc
Check out Telerik http://www.telerik.com/ They have some great tools like their RadGrids and specific imput textboxes that once you get used to will save a ton of time and add a lot more flexibility. Definitely worth a look.
No THE framework has everything you normally need. But the amount of tooling available is tremendous! We use asp.net 4.0 but we choose DevExpress controlls to get nice look and feel and functionality that would cost too much to build myself.
We worked with almost every component builder in the last 10 years but DevExpress is our favorite for one simple reason. Super fast support! And I agree with the above comment about Infragistics very disapointing support!
But again those vendors or other community frameworks are there too make our life even simpler. By itself THE framework can solve almost everything from THE core libraries.
Good luck switching to C# again my favorite language too!
I need to generate reports from database (billing forms for example) from ASP.NET interface. So I'm wondering which approach is better : Use Crystal Reports, reports based on RDLC or SQL Reporting Services ? I need to create an interface, which allows user to select data and through pre-created report definition generate that report. I want to use ASP.NET with AJAX, so it will act as a real application, but with no need for installation - and this is primary requirement.
So, if somebody knows which technology suits best those requirements...I will be grateful :)
Personally I would go for DevExpress XtraReports.
I have used it in the past in both windows forms and web forms; it costs few hundreds of bucks but with the package you also get plenty of other UI controls, or you spend less and only buy XtraReports. It pays off in a flash, main advantages in my opinion are:
each report can be designed with a Visual Studio integrated designer and becomes a simple c# class, easy to instantiate and use, no magic and no external report definitions, all pure 100% .NET code;
end user designed is royalty free and users are amazed by the power and quality of the designer, with Ribbon or classic UI, plenty of features;
so many out of the box zero coding ready to use features like print preview, export to excel, pdf etc...
Disclaimer: I do not work for DevExpress, I am not paid by them, simply I am a satisfied customer and used their products before with joy and good results, we are now in the process of starting a major MVC application development in my company and we are buying licenses of their DXperience Enterprise subscription these days.
you are free to also evaluate or test Crystal Reports or similar reporting solutions offered by ActiveReports, Telerik etc, I can only speak about XtraReports because I used it a lot, Crystal I used in the past with Visual Studio 2003 but I was not so impressed by the designer and deployment was really a mess in windows forms... always missing some files and having errors on client machines...
I would suggest taking a look at ActiveReports 6. It provides great features and allows you to make almost unlimited customization to your report. For ASP.NET you can either opt for the standard edition which allows you to custom export your reports to different formats like PDF, Excel etc and display them to the users.
The professional edition provides you a webviewer control which allows you to display reports directly on the viewer and the user has the option to chose from PDF, HTML and FlashViewer format. In addition to this it also provides a silverlight based viewer control.
You may also want to check the blogs and the forums just in case you want to get more information about the product.
Thanks,
Sankalp (GrapeCity)
Don't miss to take a look into List & Label, too.
We've done some good projects with it!
We use SQL Server Reporting services, it has a visual studio based designer, and it's free. The distribution is a little tricky - If your clients already have SQL Server installed, then there is a a good chance they will have the reporting framework installed. Otherwise you can get just about distribute the dll's with your application - although this takes a bit of digging.
I've started to wondering whether ASP.NET Webforms/MVC even have a place in the web developers toolbox anymore... It seems that CMS systems like Umbraco have replaced the web developers job. Yes I know that those CMS systems are built with ASP.NET Webforms/MVC - however is there even any reason for learning those things if all you gonna do is to use a CMS system anyway? - Also I cant find any situation where a CMS system can be replaced by your own web application.
My question is therefore: Is there any reason for learning Webforms/MVC when using a CMS?
EDIT:
My question might be more like: When should I use a CMS, and when should I go and build my own web app?
The problem with CMS solutions, and I mean all CMS solutions (not just Umbraco, or other .NET solutions, but in any language) is that you will always pay a price for using them. You may gain more from the time-savings afforded by using the CMS, but there are trade-offs to consider:
You will sacrifice a great deal of flexibility
You could pay a significant performance penalty. Many CMSs load a large amount of modules and code to service every request, and much of this is not relevant to a particular page function. (though some CMSs are more monstrously heavy than others!)
The future of your project is tied to yet another vendor, and their own choices
Very often, you rule out the possibility of using other databases that might have better fit your customer's needs (Umbraco doesn't support PostgreSQL, Kentico only supports SQL Server)
Once you start using a CMS you will be tied into satisfying the architectural decisions and API of the CMS framework, and you could eventually be backed into a corner.
This can be particularly problematic if your 'site' is more of a web application than a pure content delivery site. In such cases it can make more sense to choose to build using the full flexibility of the web application framework, rather than risk getting backed into an architectural corner.
On the other hand, if you are building a web site that has potentially hundreds of pages, with a lot of user-contributed content and is much less of a web application, then often a CMS is the way to go, and makes a lot of sense. But remember, you now have two frameworks and two APIs to learn and manage (your platform's framework and the CMS framework).
Writing a CMS is like invading Afghanistan.
Everybody gets a turn but nobody wins.
I don't think that Stack Overflow could have been built with a CMS. Does that answer your question? =)
Update
To answer your updated question.
If you want a regular corporation web containing news, articles, forum etc: Go ahead and use a CMS.
If you need to build a more custom web site like stackoverflow, a web interface for a system or anything like that: Built it using MVC etc.
I personally use a CMS for our corparate website and a MVC framework to build user and administration interfaces for our products.
Not every problem needs a CMS. In the same way not every problem needs a bespoke MVC/webforms website. It depends on what your requirements are. You pick the technology to solve the problem.
Build vs buy is the hardest decision to make. As a developer build always looks best. You can do better than that pile of carp they want to buy. Nevermind that you're reinventing the wheel, axel, cart, etc. To users/management buy always looks best. They don't have to think to hard about what they want and can have it now, not 3 months later after you write it. They forget it'll cost the same again to customise & make it impossible to upgrade.
I'll stop ranting now.
Umbraco is a pretty bare minimum CMS. To customize it (e.g. Version 7+) you'll need to know Heavy MVC, JSON, XML, Sql, etc.
In fact a Site built on Umbraco 7+ is entirely based on MVC views you set yourself and assign to SurfaceControllers (which are MVC controllers) and all you are really getting is the ability for users to edit things about your pages and have Umbraco manage it for you in a DB.
In short you still need experienced web developers to build a site on Umbraco, they just save a lot of time by not having to build the entire backend from scratch.
You use Umbraco to organize Document Types that define what Templates (MVC Views) are used for rendering different types of documetns (e.g. Web Pages) and then you built the template from the ground up with 100% control over the HTML, Css, and Javascript that get's output.
Imo Umbraco is more of a Framework like Django than a complete CMS.
Sure you can build a site in Umbraco and not customize anything, but it would be a pretty cheesey site.
The whole point to Umbraco is to give skilled .Net Developers a good platform for building a site on top of it, but they still have to build it.
Now sharepoint would be more of a complete CMS out of the box that you can do a lot with, but let's see a few problems with SharePoint...
Resource Heavy, eats 50+ Gig's to install
Eats 16 GB of ram just to boot it up (Sharepoint 2013)
Requires Sql Server 2008 R2 or equivalent (enterprise license, $$ chaching)
Requires Windows Server ($$chaching)
It's a monster basically, if all you need is a user editable blod platform... man what a waste of money. Foundation is free, but doesn't include things like the Blog Site Template, so you buy a server enterprise license ($$ big cachinge, 40,000$+ in some scenarios...)
Agreed. A CMS like Umbraco provides a (very) good out-of-the-box solution for the most basic applications. Any sort of specialized purpose is going to require additional programming knowledge. Anymore, though, and your major, if not primary need is going to be a good understanding of the business need. I think we're getting away from building the Legos themselves and on to building the neat toys with the Legos. Cheers!
A CMS (or similar application framework) will provide you with a lot of functionality out of the box, and many of them also have a good library of plug-ins. But you'll still need to write WebForms/MVC code if you want to add any custom features.
Now before I dive too far into this this question, I am aware of nDjango and MonoRail; however, those project seem to be lacking.
What I'm wondering is if there is a solution out in the .Net world that has the following features out of a single box like Rails has in Ruby or Django has for Python. I know tools that do pieces but am curious if there's 1 unified solution out there.
Database Versioning/Migrations
ORM or similar code gen
MVC-based
Pre-generated administrative screens
View generation
Theming / styling
(I'm sure I'm forgetting another cornerstone feature)
There's lots of options that cover one or more of these aspects but is there something in .Net that covers all of them?
Thanks
I have not yet found a solution as you have described, but as you know there are bits and pieces that could be used together to provide a stack that is close:
Database Versioning/Migrations - DotNetMigrations
ORM or similar code gen - Nhibernate, Entity Framework
MVC-based - native to ASP.NET MVC
Pre-generated administrative screens - PLINQO
view generation - available in Entity Framework or CodeSmith templates, PLINQO
Theming / styling - native to ASP.NET
This would provide a stack that is .NET and not another ecosystem sitting on top of a .NET substrate.
You can actually run Rails under the .NET DLR. This allows you to not only access the feature set Rails provides, but also everything else which is available in the .NET ecosystem.
I haven't found a one click installer which gives me everything on your list, but, as you say, I have found excellent solutions for each point on your list which integrate well.
I'm honestly not sure how close this gets you, but S#arp Architecture seems to be trying to cover a lot of this ground in a single package.
There is a django for .net, the name is django!
In the web there is a lot of post about django running with ironpython (a implementation of python for the "virtual machine" of C#, CLR, i think)
there is also ndjango - the django templating language written in f# for .net. you can use it with bistro or asp.net mvc (or whatever else that you plug it into)
We are developing a CMS in ASP.NET. We love the idea of add-ons (like in Wordpress, where any developer can add a menu button or a widget) and would like to enable developers to do the same with our system.
However I think that the fact that C# is a compiled language is an obstacle in the way of add-ons.
Am I right? Or is there a way to create add-ons for a ASP.NET application?
The fact that C# is a compiled language isn't a problem at all. In fact the .NET framework should make it relatively easy to load other code (just as Java does, for the same reason). Look into the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is all about loading Add-Ons in managed code.
It's not an obstacle at all. MEF has already been mentioned, you could also use:
System.Addin
Mono.Addins
I'm not sure for ASP.NET specifically, but in the only compiled programming language I know (Objective-C/Cocoa), there's the concept of Bundles that can be loaded dynamically. I'm not sure how that works on the backend, but I'd guess that there is some similar system for C#/ASP.NET.
I don't know how it's done in Wordpress, but there should be many ways. You can allow developers to upload their assemblies with compiled code or you can allow them to upload code in C# or IronPython or anything that supported and compile it dynamically. Maybe you can use WebParts for your task.
Microsoft has created the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), specifically for this problem: providing .NET plugins for .NET applications. It is the framework that (future versions of) Visual Studio use for writing managed plugins.
However, please consider using a dynamic scripting language for this! Problems like this are exactly what they are specifically designed for. If you host the Dynamic Language Runtime in your application, it not only means that your users can extend the application in a scripting language, but even in any dynamic language (scripting or otherwise) for which a DLR implementation exists: Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, Scheme, JavaScript, PHP, you name it. Biggest disadvantage: the DLR hasn't been released yet.
In C#, you can create any assemblies, link them as DLL files and then do whatever you want.
The usual case would be to define some kind of Plugin Interface which must be implemented by all the plugins.
Then you can load all plugins from the filesystem (by iterating over the plugin DLLs), find the class inside which implements the interface, instantiate it and work with it.
If you want to provide plugins with unloadability and security, you could create an application domain and load the plugins to that, increasing complexity, but also increasing stability (a bad plugin won't crash your app).
Please ask more specifically if you want a specific answer :-)
It's not too difficult to put hooks in place. You have to define in advance where the add-on features will appear. For example: when drawing a menu you can use reflection to search other dlls (with specific names and locations) for a "BuildMenu" function. You'll be defining the API for this function signature. It may have to return a list of items to be added to the base menu items collection.