> As much as I like ASP.NET, Next has leapfrogged it for web apps.
Look, I like NextJS as much as the next guy - I'd say it's my main working technology right now. And I've never built anything on .Net - I know its characteristics from watching tutorials and reading docs.
My take however is that "web apps" is a very broad world. NextJS gives you a thin API layer. There is no model layer to speak of. You're left fending for yourself in the wild, wild world of JavaScript.
.Net Core, on the other hand, offers a batteries-included, heavy-lifting, opinionated framework, with an immense toolbox and many conventions to guide you. There has to be a reason why people speak such wonders of it. If I had to build something enterprise-y with more than handful of devs it would probably be my choice.
The grass isn't greener. I've built in both - I have a .NET Core/Angular SaaS app that I created and sell, and I've been building greenfield in Next. I much prefer Next.
The duplication in .NET/Angular has never been worth it...not once. And having network calls for everything is unnecessarily painful.
I started the app in 2019, when RESTful SPAs were all the rage. I bought into the hype that you should have API endpoints for everything no matter what, because you'd soon have a mobile app and daemons and this and that.
Turns out, YAGNI. It would've been better to server-side render and only create API endpoints when necessary.
That's what I like about Next: Static generate where you can, server-side render per request where you can't, SPA where necessary - and the layers are as flat as can be. It's the best of all worlds.
That being said, I've worked in .NET for ~16 years now, and I like it more than JavaScript/TypeScript. But I'd still rather develop a web app in Next and put any background services elsewhere in .NET if needed.
> But I'd still rather develop a web app in Next and put any background services elsewhere in .NET if needed.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I think we're essentially saying the same thing. I would start pretty much 99% of my projects in NextJS. But if I needed to reach for something doing complex logic and scaling to a larger team, I could always add a .Net service to that later.
If anything the model layer in Next.js is superior because you can use the same model layer to build the page SSR, and then Next.js will gracefully transfer the entire model layer over to the client where your app can continue to work against it.
Look, I like NextJS as much as the next guy - I'd say it's my main working technology right now. And I've never built anything on .Net - I know its characteristics from watching tutorials and reading docs.
My take however is that "web apps" is a very broad world. NextJS gives you a thin API layer. There is no model layer to speak of. You're left fending for yourself in the wild, wild world of JavaScript.
.Net Core, on the other hand, offers a batteries-included, heavy-lifting, opinionated framework, with an immense toolbox and many conventions to guide you. There has to be a reason why people speak such wonders of it. If I had to build something enterprise-y with more than handful of devs it would probably be my choice.