November 2005 Blog Posts
I had quite a bit of feedback from my previous post, so I figured I'd step up and do Super Villains now.
The Doc-inator
Credit to sam on this one. This is the developer/manager that demands excessive documentation. Instead of embracing a policy of clear and concise naming conveyntions (self documenting code), this villain demands that every single property and method receive a full documentation template header. Even if the comment for the property LastName is 'last name of user, it must be documented.
The Doc-inator takes perverse pleasure in binders and anything that can be compiled that will never be read by...
I was cruising the Joel On Software forum recently and came across this post and I felt compelled to blog my thoughts.
I often find it quite perplexing, the term superprogrammer. It seems that people are looking for this one size fits all definition of what is super. This doesn't tie well to the definition of a super hero though which is the metaphor being used. Super heroes are certainly super, but not perfect. Generally a super hero has a few abilities that scale far beyond that of the average person (and oftentimes some weaknesses that scale far beyond as well). ...
So I have wired up the I am Brilliant application to use app_themes.
I would like to say that I'm pretty impressed with the App_Themes concept and I plan on leveraging it soon. To set a theme at runtime you simply set page.theme="blah" in your pre_init method.
What was driving me crazy was that the login page of my application was not getting the theme so it was showing up all crappy since the css and images were not appearing. This bothered me greatly for a day or so and then it hit me:
If you want to use themes on a "public page"...
Ok, so I've had a lot more time to spend in the production run of VS 2005 and .NET 2.0.
First I'd like to say that the deployment isn't as bad as my initial reaction. I have high hopes for the new build tool though since compiling into a single assembly does make sense and helps on my current projects. I definitely understand how different styles would feel otherwise. Frankly we have been very good about seperation so our aspx code behinds are really just calls to a business layer which is a seperate dll. Hence once the layout of pages...
Just wanted to share that my team has successfully moved the Brilliant web application over to .net 2.0. It did build out of the box but we also stripped out the user controls and moved to master pages and themes.
Total time spent was < 3 days (~75 pages plus business layer). I'm pretty pleased.
Brendan reminded me with this post that I haven't updated anyone on the state of Easy Assets for a while.
Like Brendan, I'm pleased to report a goodly amount of downloads. Also like Brendan I have received 0 code submissions from the community and have grossed $0 in donations. Seems to me that the open source experiment is failing.
The repercussions? Not much really, I'll probably get on converting it to .net 2.0 sometime in the next 6 months. The main repercussion is that without community submissions and/or donations the priority of coding enhancements on Easy Assets is waaaaay down the list...
ASP .NET 2.0 deployment pretty much sucks. Just thought I'd share.
Why is there no option to compile everything into 1 assembly like in 1.1? In all honesty, my deployment times have probably increased five-fold.
Other than that I'm pretty happy with the new designer and controls. The IDE is good, I had very little difficulties migrating 1.1 apps to 2.0.
But the deployment... why? Are we being punished?