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I just came across an article titled "At a Glance: ASP.net vs. PHP."  Let's be clear up front: I don't know diddly-squat about PHP.  I'm not here to start yet another language battle, in a war that will never be won :)  However, I do have some comments for the article regarding ASP.NET.  And, since there doesn't seem to be a way to post comments on the "Market Day" site, you get the benefit of reading them here :)

Ian Wilson writes:

In order to develop with ASP.Net one must obtain the extremely expensive Microsoft Visual Studio Programming Suite.

I won't argue that Visual Studio 2005 Professional or Team Edition is very expensive when compared to free.  However, the author fails to mention that you can develop ASP.NET using one of the free Visual Studio Express Editions, or even your favorite text editor.  What can you do with an Express Edition?  Just about anything you can imagine.  If you really need features that aren't available in the Express Editions, chances are you're developing for a company that can afford to pay for the upgrade.  For the individual Web developer, check out Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and one of the many starter kits that are available.

One of the arguments the author uses for PHP is the wealth of community resources.  I believe the same argument is true for ASP.NET.  Check out my list of free tools and resources.  There are lots of other great sites and online blogs for ASP.NET developers.

ASP.NET is a viable solution, even for individual developers who are community-minded, budget-conscious, and into open source.  Happy coding!

If you've been a subscriber of my blog for while, you probably know that I am a big fan of ComponentArt's Web.UI controls.  Their controls are absolutely outstanding, both from a user's and a developers perspective.

ComponentArt has announced a new suite of controls created specifically for Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX framework (formerly known as Atlas).  With extensive client-side APIs, integration with the Atlas type system, and optimized to work with the UpdatePanel control, this suite should prove to be the premier components for building rich, interactive AJAX-enabled Web applications.

I've been trying out Google Reader for the last couple of weeks.  I opened my browser tonight and was pleasantly surprised by a new version.  It's not just an update, it's a whole new app. 

Instead of categories, feeds are now arranged in folders much like other RSS readers.  As you scroll down your list of unread items, they are automatically marked as read.  I think the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded, too.

Be sure to check out the "Goodies" under account settings.  You can add book marks that allow you to navigate subscriptions, and to subscribe to new feeds without leaving a site. 

The only bummer is that it reset the status on all my feeds, so I had to mark a lot of items as read that I had already seen.  Not a very big deal, since you can click on folder and mark all items as read.

A guest speaker at my church has given us a homework assignment: tell our story to at least one person before returning to church tonight.  I decided to write my story down.  There's a lot more I could say, but I wanted to keep it as short as possible.  If you would take the time, I would greatly appreciate you reading it. 

Here is My Story.

Speaking of great apps that keep getting better, there's an interesting mojoPortal vs. DotNetNuke post over at mojoPortal.  Also, take a look at the interesting comments from a DNN user (www.wwwcoder.com). 

Joe reports that a new release is just around the corner.

dasBlog continues to improve.  The list of new features is very impressive.  I was able to upgrade without much effort.  If you're looking for simple-to-use and yet very powerful blog application, dasBlog is worth a look.  Also, check out the dasBlog documentation.

I just watched a very cool web cast for SubSonic (aka ASP.NET ActionPack).  Inspired by Ruby on Rails, it delivers to ASP.NET some of the same features such as rapid prototyping and data scaffolding.  Here's a quote from the SubSonic Community site:

This is our first step to try and pull the fun that Ruby On Rails is back into .NET. ASP.NET is getting bogged down with sooooo much ... "bloat" that it's hard to do our work on a daily basis without feeling like our code is not "best practice". We got into this because we thought it was fun - let's make it that way again!

Add the assembly, update your web.config, add a couple files, and away you go.  Out of the box it supports SQL 2K/2K5, MySQL, and the EnterpriseLibrary.  SubSonic also includes built-in code generators for your apps that must live in a Medium Trust environment.  Definitely worth a closer look.