Quiz: Is WebMatrix Right for You?

Last week I published a few posts on WebMatrix and Razor. The first was a preview of a jQuery Rating Control in WebMatrix with Razor from Infragistics and the other was a fun post displaying my imagined  cover  for the WebMatrix book.

I was a little disheartened though when I got this comment on one of the posts:

Wow, that looks pretty horrible.  I hope that the examples are just the usual marketing fluff to show how easy it is, and not intended to be how apps are actually written in this thing.  Reminds me of the worst parts of PHP and ASP, before folks started understanding how to apply good separation of concerns to web development.

Now to be honest when I read the first line, I thought he was saying my design was horrible, but then I realized that he just didn’t get the intent of the WebMatrix effort. My guess is that this is the kind of guy I'd like to spend a couple of hours talking shop. I can tell from his passion that he's an accomplished developer who cares deeply about the quality of guidance and frameworks/tools that are made available to the developer community. The thing is these new tools aren't intended for him and in all probability, WebMatrix is not for you.

WebMatrix is a stack and tool for folks just entering the ASP.NET development arena. The hope is WebMatrix will provide an easy on-ramp to the enterprise worthy frameworks for the those new to the party. WebMatrix is more concerned with you learning the fundamentals than allowing you to effectively separate the concerns of your application, unit test every aspect of your site or create an n-tier solution.

So I thought what better way to illustrate the point than with a silly little quiz to help guide the way! With all apologies to The Oatmeal, I present to you:

Published Monday, July 12, 2010 8:30 AM by craigshoemaker
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# re: Quiz: Is WebMatrix Right for You?

Monday, July 12, 2010 6:42 PM by Craig

I think you are correct. Anyone who is a professional web developer should steer clear of WebMatrix, but I can think of a couple of people I know who it will be perfect for. Will they create the best architected applications. No. Does it matter, not really, it's just designed to get them going. Just as you avoid the fine details of engine tuning to a learner driver, avoid telling a learner programmer about separation of concerns, unit testing, multi-tiered architectures and all that stuff. It will just confuse and ultimately dishearten them. They just want a web page.

# re: Quiz: Is WebMatrix Right for You?

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 1:58 AM by Paul

Well, that was me you quoted, and I appreciate the feedback and follow-up.  You're right that I'm a professional developer, but my sentiment wasn't out of not getting it (I don't think...), rather I really thought that the examples I saw were off the mark.

What do I mean by that?  Well, I recognize the desire for simplicity for both new devs as well as folks who want to have a one-off solution.  I'm worried for both of those camps using the WebMatrix examples I read (not saying the platform as a whole sucks, I haven't used it and have no business taking that position), just that the examples I saw were not what I would've hoped to see.

Why?

Well, to be honest, the one-off folks would probably be better off with something more packaged (i.e. not have to write their own database calls, however easy that may be).  They can get that right now with any number of free and paid products, and the ease of deployment is already there through WPI.  

The folks that are looking for a gateway drug into programming, I'd suggest are getting a disservice from what was presented, because while it does ease them into it (which is good) some of the things appeared to fly in the face of what I would call "common sense for everyone" (by everyone, of course, I mean the everyone that's involved in putting sites online).  Best example of that is the raw SQL that was in the pages, and didn't appear to even be parameterized or sanitized in any way.  I know, it's written in C# and VB, so you could do parameterized queries (or, hopefully, linq), but the point is that this is an example that a new, impressionable developer will internalize and write websites never realizing the potential dangers in it.  

Now, if Web Matrix takes his raw SQL and sanitizes it and all that to prevent sql injection attacks and so on, that's great, but I missed the part of the docs that talked about it.  But I would also suggest that the sum of my feelings on this platform are that it sits squarely in between being easy enough for folks who aren't interested in ever programming and those that want to learn how to program.  But by doing so, I think it's doing a disservice to both.  

That's my 2c anyway.  I do like the sentiment that drove you guys to come up with it, just kinda sketchy on some of the implementation (as displayed in the examples I saw)

Paul