Admittedly, I haven't really got too far into ASP.NET (core). I've only gone through the first few tutorials or so, and based on what I've found so far, I've decided that it warrants a full first impressions blog post.

ASP.NET is fascinating, because it takes the design goals centred around developer efficiency and combines them with the likes of PHP to provide a framework with which one can write a web-server. Such a combination makes for a promising start - providing developers with everything they need to rapidly create a web-based application that's backed by any one of a number of different types of database.

Coming part-and-parcel with the ASP.NET library comes Entity Framework. It's purpose is to provide an easy mechanism by which developers can both create and query a database. I haven't really explored it much, but it appears to perform this task well.

If I were to criticise it, I'd probably say that the existing tutorials on how to use it are far too Windows and Visual Studio-oriented. Being a Linux user, I found it somewhat of a challenge to wade though the large amount of Visual Studio-specific parts of the tutorial and piece together how it actually works - independently of the automatic code generators built-in to Visual Studio.

This criticism, I've found is a running theme throughout ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core. Even in the official tutorials (which, although they say you can use Visual Studio Code on macOS and Linux, don't actually make any accommodations for users of anything other than Visual Studio), it leans heavily on the inbuilt code and template generators - choosing to instruct you on how to make the absolute minimum amount of changes to the templates provided in order to achieve the goal of the tutorial.

This, unfortunately, leaves the reader wondering precisely how ASP.NET core works under the hood. For example, what does services.AddDefaultIdentity<IdentityUser>().AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>(); do? Or what's an IdentityUser, and how do I customise it? Why isn't ASP.NET just a NuGet package I can import? None of these things are explained.

Being the kind of person who works from the ground up, I'm increasingly finding the "all that matters is that it works" approach taken by ASP.NET to, ironically enough, ease the experience for developers new to the library, rather frustrating. For me, it's hard to work with something if I don't understand what it does and how it works - so a tutorial that leans heavily on templates and scaffolding (don't even get me started on that) confusing and unhelpful.

To an extent, I can compare my experience starting out with ASP.NET with my experience starting out with Android development in Java. Both experiences were rather painful, and both experiences were unpleasant because of the large amount of pre-generated template code.

Having said this, in Java's case, there was the additional pain from learning a new language (even if it is similar to C♯), and the irritation in keeping a constant balance between syntax errors from not catching an exception, and being unable to find a bug because it's actually an exception that's been eaten somewhere that I can't see.

Although ASP.NET doesn't have terrible exception handling rules, it does have it's fair share of issues. It's equivalent, I guess, would be the number of undocumented and difficult-to-search bugs and issues one encounters when setting it up for the first time - both on Windows (with Microsoft's own Visual Studio!) and on Linux (though, to be fair, it's only .NET Core that has issues here). The complexity of the system and the lack of decent tutorials and documentation result in a confusing and irritating experience trying to get it to work (especially on Windows).

In conclusion, I'm finding ASP.NET to be a failed attempt at bringing the amazing developer efficiency from .NET to web development, but I suspect that this is largely down to me being inexperienced with it. Hampered by unhelpful tutorials, opaque black-boxed frameworks with blurred lines between library and template (despite the fact it's apparently open-source), and heavy tie-ins with Visual Studio, I think I'll be using other technologies such as Node.js to develop web-based projects in the future.