[thelist] hand-coding .NET

Greg Holmes greg.holmes at gmail.com
Tue Aug 7 04:40:51 CDT 2007


"Joel D Canfield" <joel at streamliine.com> wrote:
>As I progress down the .NET road from 1.1 to 2.0 to crimenently my ISP
>says they have 3.5something installed for testing, I've gotten the
>impression that hand-coding is going to become more difficult or less
>convenient (or less filling vs. more taste? dunno.)

>How 'bout all you .NET gurus - if I'm going down the path of building
>.NET applications for intranets, am I already in the throes of a Greek
>tragedy, being inexorably driven toward GUI-based web dev? Or is it all
>going to turn out okay in the end?


Well, I've gone down the road of "Classic ASP" to 1.1, then to 2.0
(though the site at my current day job is still 1.1) ... here's a couple
thoughts.

1. I love single page model (i.e. having a script runat=server block in
your aspx page instead of using a code behind). It is "not recommended"
by MS, of course, but it just doesn't get much easier than changing
the *one* file for the page you want to change, uploading it, and letting
it compile on the fly.

And as for migration, I've had the least problems with the single page
model.  Heck, I've had some single page model pages I didn't need to
change at all to go from 1.1 to 2.0 (can't say that for codebehind -
they changed the #$#%$ syntax *to link codebehinds to ASPX files*.
What the heck were they thinking?)

As long as they keep supporting the single page model, I'm happy.


2. OTOH, ASP.NET 2.0 *added* the ability to let the codebehind model
compile on the fly too - so they made it *easier* to work without Visual
Studio!

With 1.1, you *had* to precompile if you wanted to use codebehinds.
So they actually moved in the right direction there, to avoid requiring
the GUI. Hopefully they'll continue, or at least stand pat.


Greg Holmes



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