wagnerblog.com

Some aspects of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 remind me a little bit of the changes that happened to Access when it went from ver 2.0 to 95. For the uninitiated, Access was the absolute king of the hill for developers during a short period in the early 90’s. It was the only product of its kind on the market and that market was red hot. for one product cycle Access was way better equipped than Visual Basic. Boy did we have a lot of fun building apps in those days. One aspect of Access that worked in its favor was the ease of use for end-users coupled with incredible coding power under the hood for developers. As time passed, somehow the product became very messy when it rev’d to 95. It seems to have received a whole bunch of functionality that was only marginally usefull for developers while at the same time the lean and mean Access 2 of yore became a bloated pig that suffered from performance problems. No wonder everyone switched back to Visual Basic for the lean and mean feel.

Fast forward a few years and somehow ASP.NET 2.0 appears to me like “deja-vu all over again”.
I maybe firmly in the minority here, but it does seem that ASP.NET has a bunch of stuff geared toward the lowest common denominator SMB (small-to-medium business). Yesterday I went to a one day seminar by a a group of people who have spent more time on the next rev than I have in the past 6 months. Somehow I hoped to hear something that would convince me I am wrong in my concerns. Wrong.

Anytime MS plans the release of a rev it has to consider what new functionality should be provided. Among the smorgasboard of choices there is usually a spectrum of items that range in their target developer audience from the novice or journeyman coder all the way to super expert “able to write a compiler in a few hours of spare time” . Consequently it bugs me when a tool gets a lot of lower end functionality added. Stuff that is only marginally useful and tends to clog up the product itself.

My hit parade of “improvements” that bug me is this.

Fourth Place: Webparts in Visual Studio.
Webparts originate in Sharepoint which in turnt is MS’s latest attempt at making Office the continued standard piece of software on corporate America’s desktops. Admittedly some parts of Sharepoint are nifty but that doesnt mean I want my primary development tool bloated with WebParts. To me this smells more of cross-marketing. I cannot imagine that among the 6 million MS centric developers in the world there was such an outcry for this functionality that it had to be added. Instead I believe it was more the other way around. Office has been a big cash cow for MS and that product group carries a lot of clout there. Anybody remember how MS used to tell programmers that we would soon write custom apps that were completely stitched together from parts of Office. This smells like more of the same.

Third Place: Built in membership services.
Again this feature is squarely aimed at SMB’s. The kind of company that has 3 developers who share among them the tasks of full lifecycle development, network, system and database administration (and who knows what else). Companies like that thrive on the “out of the box” lowest common denominator experience provided by this addition.

Second Place: Master Pages
Maybe I’m missing some part of the big picture but hosting pages inside of user controls for an “enriched design experience” sounds to me just a bit like Dreamweaver envy. I am open to a change of mind and hope to come back here one day to say I was wrong on that one.

First Place: Declarative Data Sources
Again SMB’s will love it. Drop a SQLDataSource on a form, set a few properties and your in business. Never mind proper application architecture.

So why even bother complain about these things? Because MS has a choice as to what functionality is supported and baked into a new release. And with ASP.NET 2.0 its more of the same “lowest common denominator” stuff. Its unfortunate when a product gets that sort of treatment. Is it really a reflection of the reality that most developers do not know how to set up a provider based system that manages its own Security and Membership Services?

Enough complaining. There are some very good improvements in the next rev of .NET.
C# for example recieved some really nice language improvements. And Visual Studio is able to publish sites without IIS. I guess you have to take the bad with the good.