What, if any, technology is going to replace ASP.NET?

Question

WinForms has given way to WPF and new models such as MVVM, that better enable Test Driven Development, work very nicely with WPF. Also, it seems to me that ASP.NET is very closely aligned with the WinForms way of doing things, for example event handlers in the code-behind which is linked using inheritance or partial classes. With WPF and MVVM, this mechanism falls out of favor and Data Binding is used to further de-couple the user interface to the point where it is just a skin.

So, I would bet that Microsoft is building something like a WPF-inspired, XAML-based replacement for ASP.NET. That is, HTML page views that are written in XAML so that they can take advantage of binding, but when run will render standards-based HTML. However, I can't find any reference online. (There is a ASP.NET MVVM article at CodePlex, but the binding there seems pretty manual.)

This is not intended as a community wiki question, I really do want to know what Microsoft is working on. However, I'm guessing that I can't stop the speculation (I've already done some).

Edit: Quite a few responses pointing to Silverlight have come through. I should have been more explicit. As cool as Silverlight is, I'm really looking for a standards-compatible technology that can be used in LOB applications.

Answer 1

They did just release asp.net MVC which gives developers the choice of using MVC instead of web forms. I'm not familiar with MVVM so I'm not sure if they are doing anything in that area with asp.net.

Answer 2

It would be either of Asp.Net MVC if you're a die hard Asp.Net fan, or if you love the WPF and/or the smart web approach silverlight.

Answer 3

It seems to me the technology you're searching for is Silverlight.

It's a web technology that supports a subset of XAML.

Answer 4

Silverlight is the closest thing that I can think of that matches your description. For the most part they are pushing MVC as a new way of doing Asp.Net.

Answer 5

Speculation: Cloud (Azure) and SOA (WCF v.next)
They keep coming up with new way of doing same things, before anyone (developers) can catch up.

EDIT: Sadly technology is driving the business than the other way round.

Answer 6

I would say ASP.net MVC, and/or WCF+REST are the main things to look into, in terms of a reboot of how web applications are written on the server. If you like MVC, but not webforms, there are other view engines that can be plugged in pretty easily.

Answer 7

According to Microsoft, WebForms is not going away. ASP.NET MVC is the change or option that people are now given for developing web applications with ASP.NET.

Please keep in mind - Silverlight 3 is around the corner and is going to become a major player in the LOB arena.

Answer 8

You are looking at ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft says it's not a replacement(but I believe most web developers will jump on it which will make it the defacto standard for .net web development), but it's a way to have a separation of concerns and isolate your business logic from your presentation. It renders to html, which is what you want.

Answer 9

somehow related:

Volta (a project from live labs for splitting tiers. So defining things in C# that gets converted to javascript (or silverlight). Although I don't know if it's still alive?!.

It's comparable with Google Web Toolkit.

from wikipedia

Volta is an experimental developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications, developed at Microsoft Live Labs. It allows developers to split their application easily into different client and server parts throughout the development lifecycle. Volta integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, supporting AJAX, JSON and more. It extends the .NET platform to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques.[1]

Answer 10

Possibly something like GWT might replace ASP.NET markup. So thinking along the lines of Script# etc whereby code is written in C#/VB and it gets translated to clientside javascript.

Mix that with some sort of browser based persistance (Google Gears etc) you get a new web programming paradigm. (disconnected fat web client anyone?)

Webforms would fall over in this scenario since its highly coupled to page postbacks.
ASP.NET MVC should be fine since its not primarily page postback oriented. Then of course you'll want your WCF/Webservice/SOA/JSON/REST endpoints to talk to this type of application.

Answer 11

Also, it seems to me that ASP.NET is very closely aligned with the WinForms way of doing things, for example event handlers in the code-behind which is linked using inheritance or partial classes.

It sounds to me like you're referring more to WebForms (i.e. classes in System.Web.UI) instead of ASP.NET.

I've fallen into this trap, too.

While WebForms are one way of doing web applications in ASP.NET, it is not the only way.

ASP.NET MVC is another, produced by Microsoft themselves. ASP.NET MVVM also exists (linked to in another answer).

Having said all that, I'm not aware of any XAML-based replacement for WebForms that don't use browser plugins.