Which is better – .Net or PHP? A review of .Net’s untapped potential

I have been working @bcwebwise for three years now, and during my tenure I have come across many requirements such as social networking, gaming, brand campaigns, etc. When I say let’s do it in .NET, there is often a client response – “Why not PHP? It’s quicker, cost effective!” or “It quickly integrates with social media. So, why .Net?”

This really got me worried, I assume this might be the case with other programmers too, and there might be an assumption at client end that PHP is the safer bet. Worrisome more given that PHP programmers are fewer in number and as a result, also more expensive. Let me quickly add that I am not a champion for Microsoft. The views expressed here are unbiased and simply to provide the benefits of .Net that should not be ignored.

Free Resources Are Available For .Net Too

PHP is not the only platform with free resources.Microsoft provides Visual Studio Express framework which is free and easy to use. It gives powerful inbuilt controls, some of which are just drag and drop and it’s done. Developers don’t need to write a single piece of code saving ample programming time.

Enhanced Interactive Web Experience With ASP.NET AJAX

Visual studio provides inbuilt AJAX toolkit which provides a powerful infrastructure to write reusable, customizable and extensible ASP.NET AJAX extenders and controls, as well as a rich array of controls that can be used out of the box to create amazing interactive web experience. Don’t believe it? Check these one page websites created using Ajax and get blown over! Don’t miss the soul link in the Tria website example shown here.

Anyone Can Build Their Own Mobile App!

Visual Studio 2013 can power mobile applications with responsive design frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap. Using CSS framework or open grid system, or even jQuery Mobile or Sencha and create apps with PhoneGap. More recently, and on Beta at the time of writing, Microsoft’s launch of Windows Phone App Studio. This is a web based application that allows anyone to build an application without writing a piece of code.

Free Database Software – Scalable, Reliable, User-Friendly Servers

Databases are used in a variety of different applications, from simple data entry lists to complex databases used to track millions of records. Microsoft has given SQL Express as a free database software. This is a very popular and powerful database software. SQL servers provide scalability, stability, reliability, and are user-friendly. It comes with graphical interface and step by step instructions so even beginners can create databases with minimum efforts. Further, SQL servers provides stored procedures which is very useful from preventing attack of sql injection.

Security for Coding

AntiXSS – Cross site scripting known as (XSS) is a frequent way that hackers attack sites. They used various types of methods to hack websites such as sql injection, inserting malicious script through URLs. To prevent from this attacks Microsoft has introduced antixss library in visual studio which is free of cost. Anti-XSS is a powerful tool and free of cost that uses to prevent from malicious script attack.

Reports

RDLC reports – Report definition language client side in short RDLC reports is very good choice for creating reports. Visual studio provides inbuilt feature to create reports. Using RDLC we can create various types of reports with user friendly GUI (graphic user interface). Reports are specially used for printing. Also these reports can be exported in pdf, word document and in word excel format.

Third party integration

Visual Studio provides inbuilt functionality to create web services. Web services are very useful when SQL data is required by a third party and we don’t want to give them access to our private sql data. So we can provide them web services which they can use and fetch the data. But they can’t see the logic coding or logic that how they are getting this data.

These are more components and frameworks such as WPF, WCF, and LINQ which are also very useful.

I am not saying .Net language is best in the market and better than PHP, Java, Pearl, etc because every language has its own advantages and drawbacks. No language is 100% perfect. But I believe there is still lot of untapped potential in .Net which remains unexploited.