I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS.
Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment.
Typically, I'll draft a post in MS Word then open the git repo for my site, hosted on github pages, duplicate and rename the template.html page that includes the CSS, footer, and header for my site and then copy my content into it. When I'm happy with everything, I'll make my commit and then a minute later it's live at my custom domain. Seeing that it takes only 11KBs and 26ms to load my landing page strangely delightful.
Impressed that this runs on my RX 6900XT (an RDNA2 GPU) in Chrome without any trouble. Very cool demo, excited to see how people leverage this capability.
I used this stack to replace a Django/Python app that was built over 2 years by another dev in 2 weeks. We regularly have 1 hour turn arounds between when an issue/feature is filed on Github and when a new build is live with that code. The self-contained deployments have made it simple to deploy this app, and now its supporting apps, to our linux-based cloud instances.
I've built on many stacks and although I agree that iteration speed is important; It has more to do with how you organize your project and the quality of your tooling than with the specific language/framework.
If you don't like the OOPy style, don't write in it. Pattern matching in C# is quite nice, and you can always mark you functions as static. As a bonus, simple functions are easier to test to.
My favorite part is the tooling. For example when you hover over a method name in VS 2019 it will show you its signature and what parameters it takes. If you right click on it and select "Go to definition" it will show you the code for the method. Just above the method name you'll a little chunk of text that says "2 References" which you can click on to see all of the places in your project where the method is invoked and links to review them. What makes ASP.NET fun is the quality and completeness of the tooling.
Make sure you have a plan to upgrade all your projects to .NET 5.[1]
ASP.NET is quite fun, if you can keep your work up to date. Opening up a project that needs bug fixes, but doesn't have access to the latest tooling in VS2019 or language syntax because it still on the old .NET Framework is a bummer.
Any company that was willing to update their .NET apps regularly, and treat development of the app as a service rather than a one time project would make me jump ship.
In a prior job I was tasked with building a REST API client for a closed source vendor product in this space as part of project to replace an existing system. Data need to be captured from a dozen on-prem databases that supported other vendor applications and then pushed into this new system using the client I built.
Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API (Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn around time.
If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it, made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with management to get it mainlined by the vendor.
We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was good at communicating.
Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable mistakes.
Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their own once a decade.
Open source property tax assessment, admin, and collection software. This space is foundational to the function of local government, but the existing closed-source offerings in this space are expensive, dated, and opaque to the public.
This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.
Yeah, my productivity would take a hit if I didn't have a quiet space and a good monitor setup. I've always assumed that coffee shops were more for meeting people than actually getting work done.
I had a very similar situation with a tax collection system written in Oracle Forms around 1999 that we rebuilt in ASP.NET Core. We had a bit more leeway than your project, but essentially we kept the navigation scheme and placement of the buttons and content panes in the app exactly the same.
The big upside of this whole thing is we were able to swap the database from Oracle 11g to MS-SQL with no impact on users. Something that just wasn't possible with the legacy tech.
I've been using it for a few months on my personal site as well.
It defaults to the light version and then switches to the dark them on request.
This is so people who don't care or aren't good with computers get the light version and those that can set the system theme have the option of getting the dark version.
"Embed .NET directly into an application" is awesome. Asking IT to upgrade the prod server to the latest version of the framework has a lot of latency.