For reasons beyond my control I recently found myself
developing in classic ASP. After years
of developing in ASP.NET this was obviously a little jarring. However, what surprised me about the
experience was that there were some things about classic ASP that I actually
enjoyed. Most notably I felt I had more
control with classic ASP. Nothing was in
my way. Things that should be simple were
simple. For a moment I imagined that
this is what it must feel like to be a PHP
developer. 
I wondered why I felt this way. After all, the whole the whole point of
ASP.NET is to save me from having to deal with “icky” HTML, JavaScript, and CSS…right? I really like developing in ASP.NET. I
would take ASP.NET over classic ASP any day of the week (and twice on
Sunday). ASP.NET is certainly one of
most thoughtfully designed and well implemented frameworks I have ever worked
with. Scott Guthrie is a genius and he has
the patents to prove it. However, I
couldn’t ignore the fact that some things were a lot easier to accomplish in
classic ASP.
I realized the unfortunate truth that there are some abstractions
in ASP.NET (and all frameworks for that matter) that can transform into
obstacles. In order to use these
abstractions you end up having to learn a lot about the internals of the framework. I’m talking about Reflector. You have to
codify assumptions about the underlying technologies into your application. In other words, the abstraction leaks.
I borrow this term from Joel Spolsky’s Law of
Leaky Abstractions. I think that the
small sense of empowerment I was feeling when developing in classic ASP came
from the fact that I wasn’t forced to dig too deep into, or worse, code around
the framework in order to get the job done.
There was no framework.
Another, even more heretical thought occurred to me during
this process. I wondered if code-behind is
always necessary. Is it always
essential to separate code and markup? If you simply replaced VBScript with C# and
gave yourself a set of libraries as rich as the BCL, would combining code and
markup be more palatable or even more productive in some scenarios? Can some aspects of ASP.NET be abandoned entirely? I’m not sure, but I’m now a little more
inclined to find out.