ASP.Net and the future

ASP.Net actually seems to be picking up steam and according to a friend-of-a-friend who does such research,

"Lamp still holds more market share, but ASP.NET has been making inroads and things are trending in that direction."

Netcraft shows IIS gaining ground.

But the picture isn't that clear. To make it fuzzier, I want to try to separate the web services from plain old web sites. Web services do not yet have deep penetration in the marketplace, and they might be a better indicator than what is now popular.

And, as a friend points out, there are plenty of examples of high-volume websites that run ASP.Net. MySpace does. As my friend also pointed out, scalability of a web application has more to do with whether it is stateless and how the database is laid out. However, ASP.Net and IIS set you up with convenient-but-deadly session variables and other cheats that refugee desktop developers will find irresistible.

Then, the cost question: how much do you have to shell out to Microsoft to run your ASP.Net application once you've built it? Without SQL Server it's not too bad, but you will wind up spending about $500 upfront plus $125/year for the rest of time just for standard Windows Server with Software Assurance. A friend notes that ASP.Net 1.1 is fully supported on Mono and is actually complete. So you could have your cake and eat it too -- as long as you don't want to try to debug that. Yikes.

Finally, fashion. Languages gain ascendancy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is what happens in schools. Lots of schools still use Java to teach computer science; at one time it was Pascal. C++ had a brief heyday in the mid-90s. Whatever the kids are doing today, they're likely to keep doing as they get older. I'm going to get my face pierced and go hang out in the CS lounge at UBC and see what they're playing with. Polyester went out of fashion in the 80s despite its durability and ease-of-use, but then was rebranded Microfibre and is now quite popular again. I don't expect that to happen with C++.

Do CS students buy Macs like the rest of college students? Do they use Parallels? Do they have Visual Studio installed? Are they debating Linux distros? Are they hardcore gamers running XP?