Mads Kristensen over at Traceworks posted a very insightful article on ASP.NET. He's pretty much dead on here about Visual Studio / ASP.NET, with its damnable drag-and-drop designer and various wizards, being very "easy" to pickup and run with if you're a new developer. This is both good and bad, I suppose.

The Good.

Using the Visual Studio web designer is probably fine if you're just dabbling in ASP.NET. Or, if you just want to make a quick-and-dirty application. You can really churn out some crappy code very quickly. So it's got that going for it. 

The Bad.

However, if you're using the designer for anything serious, it's just a recipe for disaster. Without a good understanding of the behind-the-scenes stuff that's going on in ASP.NET, as a developer, you're really limited. To boot, try maintaining some shoddy web app that was thrown together with the designer--I'd rather eat nails.

As Mads indicates:

"I have never seen a professional web developer use the designer for other than personal hobby projects and there is a reason for that."

True Story. I've never worked with or even known a professional developer who uses Visual Studio's drag-and-drop web designer. My good friend, DustyD, set me straight a few years back when I first started professionally coding by telling me to avoid the web designer as much as possible. (Of course, the old Visual Studio 2003 designer also mangled the hell out of your HTML markup.) 

The Worst!

But, I was really shocked after attending the HDC06, here in Omaha, a few months back. One of the speakers, I think it was Steve Loethen from Microsoft, asked the audience in one of his presentations if they've never written JavaScript in an ASP.NET application. An overwhelming number of "developers" raised their hands; it had to have been at least 50% of the room. Sadly, Steve said it was pretty typical for the average Joe developer to never really delve into the behind-the-scenes stuff that takes place in ASP.NET (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Etc.).

There's some really good comments on Mads's post. This one pretty much had me rolling on the floor laughing (and crying):

"... ASP.NET's target market is not the developer of the next DIGG or FLICKR, it's the corporate enterprise development team that has to crap out some poorly conceived web app dreamed up by a pointy-haired boss. This is, unfortunately, at least 80% of the IT market and ASP.NET covers at least 80% of their needs in its current state, thus its "good enough" for them." 

Needless to say, incompetent and ignorant ASP.NET developers make me a Sad Panda.

Cool Panda Art from Heather Sumpter