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July 22, 2005
Sharp Develop Rocks
I was having all sorts of difficulties with free versions of Microsoft's various flavours of Visual Studio and even with a full blown version I borrowed (its uninstalled again - didnt work for me, ok BSA?).
I just couldn't get a DLL for an ASP.NET project compiled without hacking the code to include all the namespaces for built in classes and methods. Nuts - and time consuming, and unnecessary!
My little saviour came in the form of SharpDevelop.
For my needs, it is great. Unobtrusive, intuitive, fast, light.
I love opensource.
I love the delicious irony of opensource doing a better job than Microsoft's own tools :)
Posted by dottie at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
July 9, 2005
asp.net
I'm beginning to delve more deeply into asp.net - it has come to dawn on me that most clients will be using vb asp.net in their applications.
I have to say that most of it is very clever, but at the same time the most horrible abomination of a development framework - for the web at least.
It encourages you to use Visual Studio to develop your 'web application'. Even simple interactions with a database are now treated as if they are full-blown enterprise applications.
In Visual Studio you 'build' your page by dragging and dropping graphical elements onto your page. This then builds all the code in the background so you dont have to. Sounds great. One problem, well first thing - font tags and proprietary javascript.
Font tags - say no more. Speaks volumes in itself.
The usually great O'Reilly books have a Cookbook for ASP.net and there is one example of the code produced for checking a form on submission - it is an unholy mess for a start, depending on ASCII character code checking instead of checking for a browser event before smugly stating - 'the above only works in IE for Netscape other code may have to be written which is well beyond the scope of this book'. Worry. Worry hard.
These tools are designed by software developers to allow other software developers create 'web applications' quickly and easily. Apparently it is also the web developers job to create the web page, again quickly and easily. The only problem is that you end up with a bloated, ugly, unusable piece of crap that works only in IE5+ compatible browsers (in other words only microsoft browsers) and offers no fall back for users of other browsing technology including those with disabilities.
It allows this new madness called code-behind where you can remove the code form your page and place it in a VB script that is kept on the server. Usually it also means that all your code behind gets gathered into one application linked into your web pages and compiled into a nice big fat DLL.
This results in madness - if you change something on your web page, you will likely have to recompile your web site.
What the fuck were Microsoft thinking? This results in an unmanageable mess of code that is likely to break the moment a maintenance developer changes anything. It is the Jenga of code.
And unfortunately I have to use it on a clients site. Woe is me.
Posted by dottie at 6:13 PM | Comments (2)