Contents tagged with ASP.NET
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The illusion of Competence
Working as a contractor opened my eyes to the developer food chain. Even though I had similar experiences earlier in my career, the challenges seemed much more vivid this time through. I thought I’d share a couple of experiences with you, and the lessons that can be taken from them.
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Hacking Web Services; Security and Telnet
If you’ve built a web application in ASP.NET chances are you’ve also consumed or even created your own web service. Web services are an easy way to share data, and even commit actions across technology lines. I recently ran into an application that used a web service that captured my curiosity – enough so that I thought I would share my experience.
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Visual Designer : A Developer’s BFF
Developers are often cast into a group and stereotyped as "visual design challenged”. The fact is, a true Visual Designer picks colors and creates designs for applications that make my attempts look like grade school arts and crafts project. But that doesn’t mean developer’s don’t care about design. Actually, I think most developers put a tremendous effort into trying to make their applications look good. It’s just that the results aren’t always award winning..
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MVC vs. WebForms, A Clear Loser Emerging
Working with WebControls and WebForms for the past 8 years has taught me a lot about web development. The one thing that I learned above everything is that the onus is on the developer to write good code. Now that may not sound like something revolutionary, but the fact is that ASP.NET WebForms makes building web applications easy by abstracting away some of the difficulties of a stateless protocol. And it also makes it easy to forget about what’s actually happening behind the scenes to make everything possible. Does that mean WebForms is flawed? No.
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ASP.NET 4.0 & Why it Matters
I hear a lot of overused and overloaded terms these days like “leaky abstraction” when talking about WebForms. As people repeat these items like robot drones, I wonder if they truly understand what it means, and more importantly how it affects a developers ability to build software. But whether it’s a group of robot drones, or an increasing number of well educated software engineers, we’ll leave for the subject of another debate. Back to the matter at hand. Of all of the WebForms complaints, it usually boils down to a few key issues – ViewState, ID generation and HTML Markup & Postbacks; each of which is undergoing changes in ASP.NET 4.0.
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Surveys, Polls, Voting, and why they usually stink
I’ve never been a big fan of surveys or polls. Not because I don’t like them, but because I always disagree with their validity and the conclusions that are drawn from the results. Lets take a look at a couple of examples. Readers Choice awards were recently handed out. I received an email from a customer who wanted to let me know that he was contacted by a component vendor to go out and vote for them, and he didn’t even own their product. To my surprise, he wanted to know where the Infragistics email was. My answer – we make a very conscious effort to limit the number of emails we send out to our customer base. At the end of the day, our decision to keep spam out of our customer’s inboxes also meant that we were at a disadvantage in the survey/poll/award. Does the poll actually show which product is the best? Or does it show who spent more time and energy on campaigning for votes?
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NetAdvantage ASP.NET Controls – The Next Generation
It’s a time of change here at Infragistics. We’re way past the half way point on our “Aikido” (Now officially just AJAX) framework, and with the 9.1 release many of the remaining classic Infragistics controls are being re-born as Web 2.0 loving replacements. I’ve got some mixed emotions, since I’ve been here long enough to have worked on these classics, but it’s an exciting time to see what the dev team has produced.
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ViewState 101
One of the most common complaints I hear about the Infragistics tools is “there’s so much ViewState, it’s bloated!”. One of the most common questions I hear is not surprisingly, “How do I reduce the ViewState?”. Before I jump into the answer (which is a simple “turn it off”), I want to discuss what ViewState is.
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Best Practices on Best Practices?
So the other day I was helping out a coworker on a project and was taken aback by the complexity of the project. I was expecting a hacky WinForms app with a single form and one monolithic method. Instead, I saw an organized solution with 6 projects, including a test project. It took me a good 30 minutes to follow through the logic from one class to the next, across projects and assemblies. This of course made me feel dumb, so my first reaction was – this project is too complex!
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Becoming a Better Web Developer: Debugging Javascript
When I first started "web development" I knew nothing more than a handful of tags, and that "Javascript is bad!". As my HTML vocabulary grew, I started to see some of the really cool things you could do with DHTML, but most of it required that naughty Javascript. Well, eventually I shook free from the unfounded notion that Javascript was bad, and have never looked back. My goal here is to give you tips to help you become the skill full ninja you've always wanted to be. We'll start out with some debugging tips working with Javascript, but I'm going to do this as a multi-part series which will also include working with css, and other points of interest for web developers.