Hi All,

I have recently been evaluating ASP.NET (I know, god help me) and I
find it breaks with all of the comfortable and natural practices that
I have built up using Quixote.

ASP.NET just doesn't feel right.  I am trying to put my finger on
exactly what it is about Quixote that seems to be such a good fit for
web apps and why that is missing from ASP.

So far I have thought of the following;

  - Quixote lets you model the entire URL space
  - ASP lets you model static directories and pages with dynamic
  content.

  - Quixote uses the directory as the main focus of development (ie,
  an object with a _q_index and various methods to represent pages)
  - ASP use the page as the main focus of development, each page must
  work out its own place within the business logic.

  - Quixote makes it easy to setup parent/child relationships between
  objects and pass context down the path via the url.
  - ASP pages must all contain a reference to a global module to
  access common information.  An ASP page knows nothing about its
  parent or its children.

  - Quixote doesn't have GUI for development that obfuscates the
  relationships  between the business objects.
  - ASP has a GUI that forces an outmoded development model (ie, drag
  and drop point and click) onto the developer.  Good for Winforms,
  lousy for dynamic web apps.

  - Quixote treats the creation of html pages almost as an after
  thought, the main thing to be developed is the business logic and
  the relationships between business objects.  The way they render a
  pages is a facet of the current context.
  - ASP treats the creation of html pages as the _only_ thing that is
  important.

  - Quixote allows separation of UI from logic by allowing the objects
  to factor out the creation of the pages.
  - ASP allows separation of the UI from logic by "code behind"
  classes, but as the page _is_ the main focus of development all ASP
  examples I have seen so far make controls visible/invisible
  depending on the context and you can't factor this out because the
  code behind class and the page share the same name, ie, index.asxp,
  index.asxp.cs is the csharp code behind page.

What does everybody else think?

Regards, Simon.