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Introducing Hristo Deshev - Mindfulness and Software

Mindfulness and Software

Looking for the true nature of programming.

Introducing Hristo Deshev

Hallo everyone! I am extremely pleased to be starting this blog (Joe, thanks for bringing me on board) and I would like to start with a short introduction.

I am a web developer with lots of love (and some hate) for ASP.NET and an AJAX fetish. I am a part of the Telerik team and me and my teammates are the people directly responsible for some of our most popular components in our RadControls suite for ASP.NET.

I have been permanently displeased with the state of the tools and platforms for doing web development and I am constantly looking for ways to sharpen the saw and get to the next level of "uberdeveloperness". This blog will focus on coping with the inherent difficulties in developing for the web -- that wonderful place with thousands of users and a minimum of three browser platforms to support. I strongly believe that using the right tools for the job and combining them with agile values and practices greatly increases our chances of succeeding at our current project. Or just about any project. Stay tuned for my experiences, tips, and suggestions!

atlantis

Launched!

Posted: Sep 05 2007, 12:04 AM by hristo.deshev | with 8 comment(s)
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Comments

Mike Yeaney said:

I've been wondering when this question would come up on the weblogs site...**grin**

Don't get me wrong - ASP.NET is a great platform that has had a ton of energy and thought poured into it by a lot of brilliant people. I personally have been using ASP.NET since it's introduction (and before that, ASP classic).  But one fact remains: it's clumsy to do web work in these environments.

My team has (embraced) the fact that the web experience exists in (X)HTML, CSS, and JS...and we develop our web UI's there using the appropriate tools.  Unfortunatley, this leaves the stock implementation of ASP.NET out, and reduced our web servers to using custom HTTP handlers (to remove the Page 'roadblocks') to proxy calls to and from our web-independent business components.  Slips right by goodness of the entire ASP.NET framework (aside from the request handling of IIS / ASP.NET runtime), doesn't it???

For example, as I watch the WCF landscape, I'm beginning to see the same approach we take come out of Redmond...JSON adapters for WCF, web clients that use web servers as 'service endpoints', etc. Telerik's ASP.NET controls are moving towards the JS-only + designer support model. It's starting to happen, but ever so slowly.

An no, I didn't forget about Silverlight (and the other F-word)...great components in their own right, but I don't really consider them to be 'webby'...more of an (nice) afterthought, IMO.

So, my question is - why is this so?  Why are the supposedly 'helpful' frameworks that insist on having you do UI work on the server constantly getting in the way of what you are actually trying to do (craft a rich UI)???  Is it really (as some put it) a bias towards the days of desktop-only development??  Or is it more of a cultural thing???

Great blog focus...looking forward to more!

# September 4, 2007 10:57 PM

hristo.deshev said:

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Mike!

I too sometimes have the feeling that the ASP.NET WebForms framework gets more in the way than helping me get what I want. I am not that radical as to throw it away completely (Hey, I work for a company that sells controls working on top of WebForms!), and I think most of the obstructions can be overcome without having to do your own HTTP handlers for everything.

I think I need to expand on that in a separate blog post.

Hristo

# September 5, 2007 1:13 AM

Kiril said:

Goog luck with the new blog, Hristo!

# September 5, 2007 3:01 AM

Petyo said:

Nice to see you on the weblogs. I Hope that you'll find the time and energy to support both your places with quality content. Awaiting some alt.net insights ;).

# September 5, 2007 6:14 AM

Krasimir Evtimov said:

It's great to see you here. Keep sharing with us your ninja-coding skills :)

# September 6, 2007 12:23 PM

Same as it ever was - More Wally - Wallace B. McClure said:

Pingback from  Same as it ever was - More Wally - Wallace B. McClure

# September 8, 2007 9:52 PM

richelliott99 said:

Love you Telerik folks!  Keep up the awesome work!

;-)

# December 27, 2007 8:10 PM

Andy Tearle said:

Thanx for "Pro Windows PowerShell" ! - a refreshing approach, very clear and readable and full of useful thoughts for anyone without an Admin or Programmer background. Worth the wait.

Regards

Andy

# February 23, 2008 3:19 PM
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