Resurrection

Sounds like the title to a sequel.  Well, perhaps that’s right.   It’s been a long time since my last post, and although many of you may be wondering if I have been morning the fact that there will NEVER be any finale to Deadwood as indeed I have, I have been primarily engaged with work.  Lot’s of work.  I did do a grand standing post naming 2008 the year of consistency and yep that was stupid.  Checking the dates on the blog are a good BS indicator.  My only defense is that I have been consistent at work, and in these times that is an achievement in of itself.

My quest has, though, been very consistent.  Rev up productivity.  A year is like a century in the world of technology and much has contributed to my “growth”.  Ewwww – sounds like I’m about to use the phrase “My journey with you has been amaaaazing.”  So scratch that – I’ve gotten smarter about somethings as circumstances have provided me greater illumination.  Yeah.

For one, I’ve learned about the short comings of .Net.  Big short comings.  Big technical debt short comings with respects to RIA.  Am I a jQuery / CSS bigot?  Nope – you just need the right tool for the job.  With regards to domain logic my strength is .Net.  If you were to ask me to create a business layer for an application I would reach for the #, C#.  That said, I am in agreement with Rob Connery – I need to add him to Pantheon along with Atwood and Spolsky – when he pronounced at MIX:

Embrace your inner scripter and stop building rockets

ASP.Net locks you into a box where if you only use the server side controls and rely entirely on ViewState, you cut your ability to adapt to change in half.  Yes – each time you have to re-compile you’re screwed.  Rely on the HTML emitted by the controls, and you’re screwed.  Try to apply CSS to an autogen’ed menu – well, ahh, you CAN’T!  Moving from the UI to the Domain, you can utilize patterns to reduce coupling and isolate the impact of changes but in some cases you need to configure, not develop.  Adding scripting to your app engine can help your users – that’s those who you are working for – introduce alterations to the solution.

I’m babbling here as I try to re-introduce the blog to people, summarize my direction, and bring new thoughts to the table while trying to remain half way intelligent.  Earlier I mentioned RIA, and in the context of ASP.Net there are some truly great things happening that allow you to combine MS platform with awesome Web 2.0 style techniques.  This post by Dave Ward at Encosia will open your eyes to the new possiblities that jQuery bring to the table for great RIA development with .Net.  That’s without Silverlight.  Enjoy.