Products · Product
ASP.NET
Raised as a usability problem by 70 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2007–2025), in 71 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Framework hides how the web works, confusing developers expecting normal modelUnreviewed
20072026- Docs don't guide developers toward simpler approaches, so the framework feels confusing2024-08-31
- Framework is verbose and one of the most user-unfriendly things the author has encountered2021-11-05
- Framework is so complicated and convoluted that hobbyists find it hard to get into2021-06-18
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Developers can't tell which namespaces to import because of extension methods2025-10-06
- DI setup is hard to find documented and changes subtly between releases2025-08-30
- Documentation rarely explains DI usage outside the framework's preferred flow2025-05-25
- Too much magical boilerplate and configuration needed to do basic tasks2025-03-14
- Relevant behavior is spread across many files, hard to follow unless you wrote it2024-08-31
- Docs don't guide developers toward simpler approaches, so the framework feels confusing2024-08-31
- Online docs are hard to navigate and don't connect the pieces2024-08-31
- Unclear which input rules to follow, so strings get silently corrupted2024-05-15
- Template fixes require server restart and re-entering form fields2024-01-07
- Hard to discover extension-method configuration APIs without already knowing what to search for2023-12-08
- Ajax implementation in WebForms is horrible and very hard to debug2023-05-05
- Harder to find what they're looking for in the docs2023-02-17
- Silently swallowed cookie errors cause redirect loops with no logs or visible error2023-02-17
- Can't click through from injected interface to implementation; must hunt for where services are configured2022-12-31
- Some places in ASP.NET code where the debugger can't be properly stopped2022-12-31
- Startup class is called by reflection, so developers must trial and error to find methods2022-11-29
- Async API behaves unintuitively and bites developers unexpectedly in production2022-11-15
- Simple tasks need obscure incantations and custom formatters; hard to make framework stay out of the way2022-07-25
- Steep learning curve, outdated tutorials, and multiple ways to do the same thing confuse users2022-05-15
- State management is opaque, forcing horribly complex workaround code2022-03-12
- Every component change triggers a full server round trip, making dialup users' experience horrible2022-03-02
- Getting it running requires configuring many moving parts correctly before anything shows2021-11-18
- Too much hidden magic makes it confusing to see how routes are defined2021-11-15
- Framework is verbose and one of the most user-unfriendly things the author has encountered2021-11-05
- Periodic job API is poorly documented and unclear how to use2021-10-26
- Framework is so complicated and convoluted that hobbyists find it hard to get into2021-06-18
- Hidden magic and usability problems make it hard to understand what happens2021-04-21
- Forced dependency injection and async patterns create bloated boilerplate, or fighting the tooling off the default path2021-03-29
- Generated HTML is awful and overriding it is hard and brittle2021-03-16
- Session-embedded URLs are unwieldy to bookmark or paste from emails2020-12-17
- Documentation often mismatches the .NET version in use, forcing constant version checks2020-11-17
- Reading config values requires about five lines of injection boilerplate in every class2020-11-10
- Hard to know which lifecycle event to put code in, confusing2020-04-29
- Getting a site online requires many steps, including security and domain setup2020-03-19
- Viewstate hidden field grows quickly for complex forms, making pages bloated2019-08-13
- Magic helpers are opaque, slow to troubleshoot, and have a steep learning curve2019-05-29
- Some built-in middleware is very frustrating to figure out2018-12-19
- DI is opaque: unclear where things come from and how they are initialised2018-02-08
- FormState made the app mostly unusable over the internet2017-12-29
- Framework dictates exact HTML, fighting it to fit requirements and design work2017-10-08
- Documentation is confusing and contradictory, though setup took trial and error2017-08-14
- Docs lack useful answers, show only Visual Studio screenshots, and have broken links2017-08-14
- Documentation is a maze; can't find a top-down architectural overview2017-07-09
- Desktop-style controls brought to the web are a horrible, reputation-damaging design2017-03-12
- Slow loads and framework fights as state data bloats every request2017-02-28
- New project from template fails to compile or run, requiring forum searches to fix environment2017-01-31
- Too many unclear ways to define routes, and no single place to view them2016-12-25
- Controllers in the same project behave and serialize dates differently, so it's hard to predict results2016-10-21
- Getting started needs many package managers and manual configuration steps2016-09-27
- Important APIs changed every month, forcing updates across almost every project file2016-05-11