I would like hear arguments, what you don't like particularly?
I'm not saying .net is the best web dev platform, not at all, but i wouldn't say it's worse than most. It has it's own set of pros/cons, like every other, but generally, to me it looks quite decent, despite heavyweight VS/IIS, which is another story. Looking at mvc, rest, looks pretty much like any other modern dev stack:/
It has a reasonable MVC model, it mostly boils down to it's just way overkill. Using t for web development to me is like using a 27 foot truck to get groceries. The beauty, to me, of even "large" web applications is that they can still be light weight.
What is "overkill?" The framework? The language? The UI? The CLR?
I have issues with Microsoft's MVC (mostly that there is no official way of splitting it across several solutions and keeping working routing) but I've never found it overkill for enterprise-style webapp development.
We used MVC/Entity Framework. It works well as a RAD for the backend with full HTML/CSS/JS for the front end that we can get creative with. Reminds me a lot of Java development.
Visual Studio is overkill for web development IMHO (and again, different strokes. I know some people like to write PHP in Eclipse.)
The MVC model itself is not overkill, sorry that sentence was not clear. I should know better than make contentious comments on HN that are going to spawn a bunch of aggressive responses when I'm trying to start my day.
Making contentious comments is fine, the problem is you have to back them up with anything solid. The basis of your argument is that Visual Studio is overkill for writing web applications. That has nothing to do with ASP.NET and more to do with the desire for simpler developer environment. This can be solved by using VSCode, or setting up Omnisharp for the various text editors out there.
You have not given any solid technical reason as to why ASP.NET is a bad framework. In my experiences, it's more or less as capable as Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Java, etc. You've stated it's overkill, meaning what exactly? Are you even aware of the changes being made to ASP.NET vNext? The dotnet cli tool? The only complaint you seem to have is that the tight coupling of ASP.NET to various Windows platforms is a little much for people who are used to Go or RoR.
You still have not provided any specific reasons for "why" you believe Visual Studio/.NET is overkill for web development. I would like to actually know because I am curious.
That's true, MVC and Webapi can do everything, like Rails, all functionalities you need and don't need are inside. Most .net devs are expecting that, compared to node devs where they would have everything splited into small packages. One fx was designed in 2000, when that made sense, other one in 2010 ...
But, you don't have to use mvc; there's Nancy or low-level Owin.
So why do people complain about MVC when there are other choices? Certainly not like in other platforms, but at least few good ones exists! Why judge whole platform because of one fx?
Similar like EF or Nhibernate. They are big and heavy and very slow if not used properly, but also there's Dapper, massive or simpleData.
