lol.. i can tell you the out-sourcing rates for .NET guys is going up in NYC...
my buddy just landed a 12 month 80k project...
6 months ago that would have been 65k in Manhattan
ASP.NET is hot right now..
Wow!
I assume your buddy is a contractor? I wonder if I was just lucky (or better than I thought I was) or if the supply of seasoned developers in the midwest is comparatively low, or the supply is a lot higher now than it was back then. When I got out of the consulting game in about 1997, I would've bid more like $200k for a 12-month project. If it interested me (meaning it wasn't yet another accounting or inventory management system).
I really didn't like ASP.NET at all when I started using it, and I still use classic ASP for any throwaways I need.
I don't like or use datagrids, though I was VERY excited by them when I first encountered them, but later found they took too much control away from me and required too much of the html stuff to be put right into the SQL queries, making the queries very difficult to read when they needed editing, and use too many bytes for my liking.
At first it was really cool, though. Several dozen lines of code replaced by just a few lines. But to me the lines of code don't matter anywhere near as much as things like query readability and especially the number of bytes of html being sent over the wire.
However, I'm VERY sold on ASP.NET for its greater efficiency. It's far more efficient at interacting with the database (and it looks like it's actually "gentler" to the db, even for identical queries) and it seems to be exponentially gentler to the webserver, due in large part to the fact that it's compiled rather than translated like classic ASP is. A side benefit of this being that comments don't cost anything like they do in classic.
It's somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison because iHub gets a lot more traffic than SI does (2 to 4 times as much -- I don't remember which), but iHub uses a rather powerful multi-processor machine with a fast disk subsystem and gobs of memory for its webserver and runs about 20% utilization most of the time.
SI's webserver is a very inexpensive machine with much less memory, an inexpensive IDE drive, and only one CPU, yet seems to be idling all the time.
My guess is that by converting a large site (such as this one) to ASP.NET, the resulting performance gain is similar to that achieved by multiplying the webserver count by 3 or 4. This becomes a HUGE consideration for companies that might be using dozens of webservers to handle a classic ASP site.
Not that the change will likely be noticeable to users of the site at all. Nothing would be noticed unless our webserver were too busy, which it's not. And is a long way from being.
The main thing that the ASP.NET will gain us is something like being able to handle 10 times as much traffic on current equipment rather than about 3 times as much, which I think is the case now.
And, actually more importantly, by rewriting the whole site from scratch, some major inefficiencies from code I've never optimized will go away because they'd be written more "correctly" from the get-go, as is the case with SI. In addition to fixing the major mess I made with Preview. <g>
Not panning the inherited code, btw. It works and at the time, it worked well enough and not only were the inefficiencies hard to notice, the scale at which it would have to operate would've been difficult to comprehend.
Happens a lot with code I've personally written and thought I'd done perfectly. A year later when the scale is much larger, I'll run across some of my code as a bottleneck, look at it, and go "What on earth was I thinking? It's obvious I should do it this other way rather than how I did it."
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