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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 July 9, 2005 6:13 PM
Comments
You don't have to compile your code behind files into a DLL. You can deploy them as source if you like and reference the source file at the top of your ASP.NET page.
Give it a chance - code behind is really a good idea once you get used to how it works.
Posted by: Derek at July 21, 2005 4:52 PM
Thanks Derek - yeah, I had used it that way before but a particular project called for the resources to be compiled. I eventually dumped the microsoft IDE, googled for 10 minutes, downloaded SharpDevelop (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/) which converted the project and compiled it in 30 seconds flat. SharpDevelop rocks!
Posted by: dottie at July 22, 2005 8:00 AM