ASP.NET Resources

August 2005

Dangers of Excessive Flexibility

Martin Fowler has a gift of writing books that read like an old friend. I don’t know what it is, but when I read them I feel I get educated, not lambasted. While reading Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code I came upon a discussion of the dangers of excessive flexibility we tend to put in our design. This little chapter struck a cord with me because I recognized something I’ve been guilty of myself.

8/28/2005 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Civic Is Back with Vengeance!

I don’t get drawn in the hype of the day easily (Ajax, tag clouds, XML friends, Ruby on Rails, you name it), but I’m psyched—totally psyched—about this year’s Honda Civic. Being a Civic owner myself, I’ve been wondering if Honda would ever do anything beyond changing the shape of tail lights on this little best-seller.

8/28/2005 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Book Review: Applied .NET Attributes

I have to agree with Jason Bock and Tom Barnaby, the authors of Applied .NET Attributes—it’s somewhat difficult to explain what .NET attributes are and what they are for. I think MSDN’s definition is a pretty good start.

8/22/2005 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Performance of Dynamic Object Instantiation

As Provider pattern has been gaining more and more favor among developers, I’ve been wondering about performance implications of dynamic object (provider) instantiation it mandates. The most common mechanism to create providers on the fly has been via Activator.CreateInstance. Steve Maine did a nice perf test of Activator vs. the new operator, which showed that Activator was quite slow (which was reasonable to expect).

8/14/2005 |

10 comments | No TrackBacks

European English

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

8/12/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Wishful Thinking: Streamlined Handling of QueryString

I wish there was a way in ASP.NET to streamline handling of query strings. The amount of work that goes into parsing a query string and avoiding dereferencing nulls if it’s improperly formatted, etc, is ridiculous. You have to write this logic; it takes your focus away from the task the web form is supposed to perform and injects an unhealthy amount of mundane code. Yes, you can refactor it and move it into helper classes and such, but you still need to chase page fields and properties and initialize them with carefully extracted query string variables.

8/7/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Don't Trust MSDN Installer

I think MSDN has been one of the absolutely best things that ever happened to developers, but, by golly, its installers always sucked. The latest ones detect an earlier library and offer a “quick install” option which preserves the options of your current MSDN setup. It lulled me into thinking it’ll just take over the old library and refresh installed content. How surprised do you think I was when I couldn’t look up anything because it wanted the original DVD (which I don’t even have right now)?

8/6/2005 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Book Review: Developing Application Frameworks in .NET

Much like Mr. Smith, who had a shed full of guns, to be good at our trade we need good tools and a solid foundation to rely on. In a general sense, we call this foundation “frameworks”. The author of Developing Application Frameworks in .NET, Xin Chen, defines framework as a set of reusable designs and code that can assist in the development of software. Short and accurate.

8/4/2005 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

What Goes Around Can't Be Recalled

True story. One day, while at my previous job, the company CEO emailed everyone about a high-ranking officer being promoted to an even higher-ranking position. The email was a typical corporate sunshine pump, “We appreciate… tremendous… contribution… promote… Please welcome…”

8/4/2005 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

Data Access Code Now and Then

Talk about interesting timing. Dino Esposito is asking: How were you writing data access code five years ago? I was thinking about it just the other day.

8/4/2005 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

Startup or Small Company?

At what point does a “startup” become a “small company”? What’s your take on this?

8/2/2005 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Repetition is Death, Code Generation is Love

If y’all are not sold on code generation yet, I have two great resources for you: one is Scott Hanselman’s talk at PDC 2005 (Code Generation - Architecting a New Kind of Reuse); another valuable resource is a book by Kathleen Dollard, Code Generation in Microsoft .NET.

8/1/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Business As Usual

My apologies to everyone for the site “outage” today. Some major kaboom happened with my provider, CrystalTech, and I had to convince them I wasn’t insane. The site came back up in the evening the same weird way it went down earlier in the day. Looks like I’m going to have to prove my sanity the second time.

8/1/2005 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Web talk

August 2005