How do you condense such huge functionality into as few words as possible? I'll give it my best shot.
For me ASP.Net is brilliant. Skills learnt programming VB or C# can be easily transferred to web developement. And that is the big plus. I bought Proffessional ASP.Net 2.0 from Amazon the other week. I opened it up and went straight to the Webparts Chapter. Bit of playing around and in a couple of minutes I had somrthing approaching the drag/drop and widget functionality that you find on live.com or google.com/ig. Out of the box. Now, that basic functionality by itself is not enough for a full blown app, obviously, but its a start. Just shows how powerfull the ASP.Net 2.0 approach to Web Development is.
I used to play around with FrontPage 2000 and kept bashing my head aginst the wall. No more. ASp.Net 2.0is great. Even though you don't really need to, I did some hand editing the html markup and it was real pleasure to do (that, I recall, was the major gripe with Frontpage 2000).
If you haven't already checked out the Mix06 sessions at sessions.mix06.com, do so now. There is a rather good one on Building Interactive Community Platforms that I just watched that focuses mainly on Community Server 2.0 . Thats another brilliant idea. Thank goodness they have a free Express Edition, because its otherwise pretty heftly. I have a few ideas, now, on how to leverage the Community Server in my own site. I can get away with that because its various features can be finely controlled. But that is a long, long way off in the development cycle.
This blog is built on top of PHP. Thanks to the wonderful people at WordPress, I have no coding to do. Its just there. I input my options (blog title, theme, sidebar widgets, comment policy, etc) and out comes the blog as you see it. I can change the theme in two clicks. In fact, I can change themes rather easily AND change the header to one that I've created and uploaded AND do simple editing tasks to the image such as cropping. There is no reason why this could not be done in ASP.Net 2.0. or any other tech such as Perl or Ruby on Rails
And thats why building an e-commerce site is so easy. All I did was get my hands on the Commerce Starter Kit. Now, I'm subtly tweaking it at the moment to get a feel for it, but its all there. It gets me to 90%, and the other 10% is mine to do. And most of that is using the web based administration tools.
I've not even begun scratching the surface of all the web design tech out there. By using these "Web 2.0" technologies that Tim O'Reilly talks about all the time, I could do the following (a favorite real life example): take apartment ads from, say craigslist, and the associated info and plot them on a map from Windows Live local or from Google and put this "mashup" on my own site. This is extremly simple to do because of the wonder of RSS.
ASP.Net 2.0 and the host of other web design techs out there are the way foward. Why? Because you can deliver highly interactive content that only a couple of years ago could only be found in a desktop app. Community Server is another example, albiet at the other end of the scale. You can build a huge community with blogs, forums, photos and files. You can even do video blogging. And everything is inter-connected. Its a highly interactive app making extensive use of Ajax running on ASP.Net 2.0. And that is the desirable part of all this: No matter if you simply want a form or a full blown ASP.Net app – its all there and simple to do, too.
Both the Commerce Starter Kit and Community Server have finely grained control panels that allow for extensive modification to the app. From addng products in the CSK to managing permissions for a user on a blog-by-blog basis in CS: it can all be done from the browser without ever having to return to Visual Studio (a great feature when the technologically-challenged will be doing some admin 🙂 ).
What does all of this say about Web 2.0? Its going to reach a point where no matter where we go on the web we will be offered exactly what we are looking for based on our pre-selected preferances, not unlike the google.com/ig or live.com homepages. Or perhaps going one step further: The browser configures the website depending on what you need/are looking for. Nothing stopping us doing that right now – we have the technology to make it so.
So the question now that we have the technology and the capability, is not "Do We Dare To" but "Do We Dare Not To"?
Random Musings 