Lots of changes coming in the next version of Microsoft’s ASP.NET – it’s exciting to see big changes coming to the framework.

Stephen Walther provides a good overview in this post of the top changes coming in ASP.NET.  Cross platform development has some real interesting potential (though I wonder how much that will cost Microsoft in the sale of Windows Servers).  Interestingly – some big deletions – Visual Basic is being kicked to the curb, and Web Forms is also out the door.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have feared for the future of Visual Basic for awhile now.  It turns out that Microsoft has put another nail in the coffin of Visual Basic, as it has been semi-announced that the next version of ASP.NET will not support Visual Basic.

As a long time VB and Web Forms developer, this doesn’t surprise me, and I must admit it doesn’t bother me that much.  I was dragged kicking and screaming to C# by the market, and do agree with most developers that it has some more robust constructs (though I don’t think that’s a limitation of the language – I would guess the VB Team just has fewer resources).  So this was inevitable I guess.

Web Forms, on the other hand, I will not miss too much.  Microsoft will continue to support Web Forms in branch of ASP.Net – for legacy purposes.    Web Forms to me has always felt like a flawed implementation.  All the hacks to get around the one form tag per page, and viewstate issues – ugghh –  long term the bad side effects overcome the nice binding features.  Once you start doing a few MVC projects and get the hang of it, it seems like a much cleaner model – especially in MVC 4+ with the handy router improvements.  I am not looking forward to refactoring (eventually) all my Web Forms Code, but when I do it will probably include a client-side framework such as AngularJS.

So with Windows 10 and ASP.Net going cross platform, I think Linux may be in my future.  So it may be time to say goodbye to my old Visual Basic and Web Forms world, and hello to the new ‘cross platform world order’.

To see a official Microsoft ASP.NET site – go to http://www.asp.net/vnext.