Reformulation: don't reduce to code reduction

Published 28 November 03 02:57 PM | despos

First off, I'd like to welcome Andrew Duthie--I liked your book and your writings about Whidbey on ASP.NET Pro. Is it you, right? I ran into you at a DevConn lately but never had a chance to say Hi.

Code reduction is a always laudable initiative and a great selling point for any technology, I think. However, we (especially, authors/trainers) just have to pay attention not to *reduce* the highlights of a cool and powerful technology like ASP.NET 2.0 to just code *reduction*. That's an important feature which greatly enhances your productivity. We should focus in presentation more on the whats that provide for such a code reduction rather than impressing people with cool demos done with little or no code at all.

Declarative programming is not bad but you can enjoy it (and control it) more if you know about, say, data source controls. This answers one of the comments about having SQL into tags. Data source controls are objects meaning that you can use them programmatically too. They're the key to ASP.NET codeless data binding; but they're first and foremost POWERFUL objects. Should we highlight this enough before we run a cool master/detail codeless demo?

All in all, this is the sense of the comment I got from that attendee.

I'm happy with Whidbey and appreciate the changes that in many cases just reflect key and clear drawbacks of v1.1. Especially, for what is inherent to VS.

PS: Andrew, I'll tell you a nice story about our books. A few months ago, at a .NET roadshow here in Italy I recommended your book instead of mine--yet to ship at that time. One of the attendees soon came up to recommend all to wait for mine instead of getting yours. She said mine would have been better anyway :-)))

No, it wasn't my wife... and not even a friend or a relative... :-)))) 

 

Comments

# Jim Martin said on November 28, 2003 12:49 PM:

I'm going to get both books for Christmas :-) Dino, I love your articles and books... Every single one of them! Why do I like your writing so much? Because, like Carl Franklin mentioned on .Net Rocks you always seem to address real world problems and provide real world solutions, not just snippets of "hobby code". Both of you keep up the tremendous work. I aspire to be just like both of you, if that is possible :-)

# G. Andrew Duthie said on November 28, 2003 03:22 PM:

Hi Dino,

Yup, that's my article on personalization all right. Which event were you at? I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to meet, as I would really like that.

As for the meat of your post, I absolutely agree that it is a disservice to our audience to focus solely on the declarative aspects of Whidbey, and the code reduction this model allows, to the exclusion of other, in some cases more powerful, new features.

For example, the new provider model that underlies many of the new features such as personalization, membership, etc. allow ASP.NET to support some very rich functionality while still providing developers with a great deal of flexibility in terms of the back-end data store used to support that functionality. I also think that Rob Howard's efforts to get the community involved in writing new providers will be very fruitful for the developer community (not to mention educational for those involved in the project).

I also think that an important distinction that needs to be made in terms of code reduction is just *which* code is being eliminated. I think most developers would agree that writing boilerplate code over and over again for common tasks is not terribly efficient or enjoyable (which is precisely why we use and love server controls, since they allow us to encapsulate and reuse code that would otherwise have to be written over and over again). Whether used declaratively or programmatically, the new controls in ASP.NET Whidbey aren't just about reducing the total lines of code one must write, they're about making it less necessary to write code for common situations that one now writes code for repeatedly.

As for cool demos vs. emphasizing the power behind them, I think that doing the "codeless" demo, and then delving into the power behind the demo could also be effective, but I agree with you completely that just doing the codeless demo is probably not enough in most cases (the exception, in my mind, being when one is giving a high-level overview, in which going into detail on the datasource controls would require sacrificing coverage of other important features).

I do appreciate the recommendation of my book. I have long been an admirer of the quality of your writing, though I wonder where you find the time to write as much as you do and still teach and take on other tasks. :-)


Jim,

I appreciate the kind words, but while I can't speak for Dino, I assure you there's nothing all that special about what I do. I'm just an enthusiast about new technologies who's fortunate enough to get paid to play with new toys and tell people about them. ;-)

# Maxim V. Karpov said on November 30, 2003 09:36 PM:

I like both of your posts guys. I am developer and trainer myself. I am glad that you started the post on Whidbey and concern about presenting the new powerful feature set to the developer. My first look at several articles published on MSND site such as “Bind Your Data in ASP.NET Whidbey” gave me a bitter taste. It is good that you do not have to write code for data binding but is it the best practice? Unfortunately developers take the code from article as such and make production level application. I really liked MVC model and I want to see more articles that support that point of you with new features added.

My two cents, Maxim

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