Reflections on ASP.NET

So before I reflect on ASP.NET, I should probably explain my role.  I am a Product
Manager at microsoft and work primarily on Web Development Tools.  Today our
enterprise tool is Visual Studio and our
light-weight experimental tool is Web
Matrix.  So, as a result of caring about web development tools, I care about
web development platforms.

I came from a background where I developed primarily ASP3 and some PHP web code. 
Not object oriented, no code-behind, simple stuff.  It was rather code-intensive,
but was relatively easy to get the job done.  So I was speaking to Brad
Millington, a PM on the Web.Net team, about why it is hard to show the virtues of ASP.NET with
some demos and power points and whitepapers.  There is this new programming paradigm
that really forces you to forget about all the old stuff you knew about web development
and take on this object-oriented/event-driven approach.  If you were a windows
developer, you are in web development heaven.  But if you were born-on-the-web,
as many of us were, it is a struggle.  Our conclusion was if we had 2 hours to
show it off, you would be converted.  Unfortunately, that is seldom an option
and I am trying to find ways to turn 2 hours into 20 minutes. 

I have had the good fortune of having 100's of hours of this conversation and I am
sold, but how can I convince the rest of em?  I guess thinking about our data
story today in ASP.NET 1.1 is what got me thinking about this.  There is still
tedium required to sync up data scenarios, but it is a lot better in this event driven
world than PHP or ASP3.  Much easier.  Down the road.. now that is some
good stuff.  Check out DataGridGirls entry here.