Keyvan Nayyeri

One of the annoying things about .NET is its position on modern web. There have been lots of write-ups about this to see why .NET has not been able to find a good position among web 2.0 sites.

Taking a look at statistics and the list of top 100 sites of the internet, we simply believe that PHP and Ruby on Rails have a much better position than .NET (and ASP.NET).

I'm not going to talk about the reasons of not having a good position on web 2.0 for .NET in details but an outline would be worth to mention here.

One of the most obvious reasons is the lack of idea on the .NET community. I don't know why but many of the Microsoft community members in general and .NET community members in particular don't have new and unique ideas to get success. We usually follow other's ideas and just try to improve them. Even same is true for Microsoft as the big company behind these communities and their members. They recently just build a better implementation of an existing idea.

There may be a relationship between the way that Microsoft duplicates the software and the way that Microsoft community members follow this way and this is a possibility for the reason. As long as we don't have good and new ideas, we can't lead the web and this is something acceptable.

The other reason is the fact that .NET came to the world since 2002 as a common technology among developers and it took 3-4 years (until 2005 or 2006) to find its shape. In these 3-4 years, people tried to teach .NET and improve its features to be able to build good software. .NET community leaders spent much time on this process and couldn't put much effort into building web 2.0 sites and communities.

But since 2006 .NET community began to evolve and things got better. So the age of .NET may be a reason to not have a good position on the modern web. PHP was older than .NET and people could use it to build web 2.0 sites that of course required a professional level of skills and knowledge.

Here Ruby on Rails is an exception. In my own opinion we would exclude it because it has had an amazing growth which normally wouldn't occur for many technologies. Neither .NET or PHP could have this progress and growth!

The third reason may be the cost of building a professional site with .NET. Such a professional site requires good hardware and software licenses and the cost of Microsoft licenses may be a stop point for some guys who can't afford it. This is not limited to server licenses because same is true for development tools. Even though Microsoft has tried to reduce these costs and even provide free development tools (as Express editions) but it doesn't seem to have any effect on professional development for modern websites because no one can be satisfied with limited features included in them. Recently I saw an article that described FaceBook is hosted on 300 MySQL server. Now suppose that if you wanted to do this with Microsoft SQL Server or BizTalk server!

However, I don't want to spend much time on these reasons. We've already passed the way and just can learn from the mistakes for the future. I was going to talk about .NET and web 3.0 which is an open space in front of us to find a better position.

Web 3.0 is going to be a Semantic Web (now you're here, read today's post by Mads as well). An obvious sign of the semantic web is the content! So Web 3.0 is going to target content-oriented sites which hopefully will feed artificial intelligence methods to analyze them. But here I don't care about the nature and goals of web 3.0.

.NET is an enterprise platform that is not limited to a server-side technology like ASP.NET. There are lots of features included in the platform that can be used in conjunction with ASP.NET to build enterprise software. So unlike PHP or Ruby on Rails that are just server-side technologies, .NET (and ASP.NET) has a plus point that can help it when it comes to technical scenarios. We have to use this power to build enterprise solutions for web 3.0. As I describe later, for web 3.0 technology and knowledge is more important than the idea and this is a key point that can fill the gap of ideas for .NET community.

To get ready for web 3.0 we need to find new ideas. It seems to be the most hard part of the process but there is no other choice. We need good ideas to implement them! But the good news is the fact that web 3.0 opens doors for duplicated ideas to get success. Here idea is not the main part. You need some methods (especially artificial intelligence) methods with a good quality to be able to work on the content and analyze that. Someone may have great ideas but it can't be success until he or she can implement it with the best quality. Here knowledge and skills play the key role not the idea! So if .NET community can improve this field then it can be success on web 3.0.

But there are some requirements that we can predict at the moment and work on them to prepare the community for the future. For a semantic web that targets content and working on the content, we need some ways to speed up the process of working on the content in any format and simplify it. Some ways to parse HTML/XHTML would be a very common stuff for the future of the web. There will be also some requirements for image processing, video processing or sound processing! As soon as we provide better features and tools for these things, we're able to lead the future of the web!

I will write more about this stuff in the future and hopefully will work on such tools to prepare requirements for a .NET-based semantic web 3.0! Web 2.0 and the idea of collaboration and communities wasn't very interesting for me but web 3.0 and the requirements of artificial intelligence and related methods are very interesting.