In the past 6 months I’ve been involved in hiring a lot of ASP.NET developers. It was very interesting to learn just how different skill sets ASP.NET developers have. It also made it more and more clear that every developer we talked to would fit into one of three categories:

• The web developer
• The developer who build websites
• The ASP.NET super hero

Before looking deeper into the different categories I recommend you too check out how I define the ASP.NET framework 

The developer categories

With the ASP.NET definition in place it is now easier to look at the different categories of ASP.NET developers we have interviewed.

The web developer

Not many ASP.NET developers fall into this category. It’s usually the ones that come from classic ASP or PHP and made the switch to ASP.NET later on. They know everything about browser compatibility, JavaScript, CSS and the request life cycle. Also, they are usually not that hardcore in C# because they have mostly worked with client technologies. They are also more agnostic to the server-side platform and can work on PHP and RoR projects just as efficiently.

The web developer is also the kind of guy who thinks about new web technologies such as microformats and OpenID. This guy lives and breathes web.

The developer who builds websites

This is by far the biggest category. We’ve interviewed many developers who have worked with ASP.NET since it was first released. They have worked with everything from the database, data- and business logic, web services and ASP.NET. Most of them don’t care much for browser capabilities or JavaScript but they are hardcore C# developers. They have built many ASP.NET sites, but they are far from experts on the framework and stuff like modules and handlers are not where they have spent most of their time to say the least.

Their knowledge of the .NET framework, BCL and C# is immense, but they don’t qualify as web developers. They don’t live and breathe web, but their skills are just as needed in an ASP.NET project.

Take a web developer and a developer who build websites and put them in a room at the Romance Inn and wait 9 months. Then you get:

The ASP.NET super hero

This breed of developers is very difficult to get your hands on. They are a special race of individuals who know all about the ASP.NET framework and client-side technologies and are just as proficient in the more hardcore C# disciplines as well. ASP.NET is a very broad and diverse area because it is the point where the BCL, C#, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, dependency injection, unit testing, mocking, AJAX etc. all come together in one project. To master all these disciplines takes an ASP.NET super hero.

The web developer and the developer who builds websites are both very important to a successful execution of a website project, but at least one ASP.NET super hero is essential in my opinion.

I have a very clear view on what ASP.NET is and what it isn’t. I’ve never given it much thought until recently when I learned that my view was different from a lot of other ASP.NET developers’. It started at an ASP.NET session at the MVP summit where a presenter asked whether or not people in the audience used the Entity Framework or Linq2Sql. I thought to myself that data access had absolutely nothing to do with ASP.NET but found to my surprise I was the only one finding it a weird question at an ASP.NET session.

Since that session I started talking to people about this and almost everyone told me that a website without some sort of database is a thing of the past and that being an ASP.NET developer involved mastering databases, data access and business logic. I don’t disagree that mastering these disciplines is a huge part of being a .NET developer, but I still refused that it had anything to do with ASP.NET. Yes, I’m that anal.

The field trip

So, I went to Barnes & Noble to find some ASP.NET books. They had 8 different titles and I started to look at the table of contents in all of them. 7 out of the 8 ASP.NET books had minimum one chapter about databases and data access. I looked at the covers again and was reassured that I was indeed skimming ASP.NET books. Not data access books, but ASP.NET books.

What I have learned in the past few months is that databases and data access is part of ASP.NET. Or in other words, ASP.NET is a database presentation framework and NOT a web application framework. Not acceptable!

Here is my view on what ASP.NET is and what it isn’t.

My clear view of ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a framework for creating dynamic websites. It is not a framework for doing data access, business logic or any other thing besides building websites. If your business logic knows it is being used by an ASP.NET project by relying on an HttpContext for instance, then you are doing something wrong. Business logic is an API for what ever (presentation) logic that sits on top of it whether it being ASP.NET, WinForms, WCF or something completely different. This is a rule of the N-tier application architecture.

Smaller web projects often have the business- and data logic classes in the App_Code folder within the web project itself. Those classes are physically part of the web project but logically they are separate from the ASP.NET logic and as such the same 3-tier architecture applies. But it is still not ASP.NET, it is just C# classes that physically lives inside the web project in Visual Studio.

ASP.NET handles everything related to browser/server interactions and nothing more. Calling the database directly from your code-behind or controller action doesn’t make ADO.NET part of the ASP.NET framework. The presence of the BCL in both ASP.NET and the business logic makes it less transparent, but I hope you see my point.

Even though the data- and business logic aspects are both related and important to ASP.NET developers, they are still not ASP.NET.

This is my clear view on the ASP.NET database presentation framework.