Will Whidbey take away the fun?

I've been watching a couple of the Whidbey presentations ScottGu did at the PDC, and I'm really impressed by the powerful controls that's going to be shipped...and concerned. Will Whidbey take away the fun from developing a web application when you can do so many things by just drag-dropping controls and set their properties? Is it just me having this feeling?

It's not that I'm not looking forward to get my hands on some of the new features and controls, like the Cache with database dependency and so on, I really do. I spend a lot of time going through and refactoring other peoples ASP.NET code, and finding bugs in a system made up from a lot of server controls with lots of properties set on them may be a bit trickier. Perhaps I'm just sad because now when these powerful features and functions are part of Whidbey, I can throw some of my old ASP.NET components and solutions out of the window.

Perhaps I should just shut up, be happy that we now can deliver systems even faster to customers, concentrate on the layering and architecture, code providers and say something in a year or so when we've delivered the first Whidbey-based project or two...

What do you say? Is it just me?

5 Comments

  • I have never thought it was fun spending an hour writing crappy code to get a datagrid to page and sort.... that was not fun code to me. I think ASP.NET Whidbey continues down the path of getting rid of the annoying code, and letting us spend more time on the things that matter, like architecture and business logic.



    Just like .NET in general, Whidbey is all about saving us from the tedious code.



    -James



  • I had the same creepy feeling when 4G-tools begun popping up and I was doing PL/1.



    But somehow I'm still having fun :-)



    Don't worry, it'll be ok

  • I've nothing against a more powerful datagrid that handles the paging and sorting for me, it's just that I see this web page in front of me, in design mode, and it's cluttered with powerful server controls with a zillion properties set on them, and and and... I guess I'll have to switch to HTML view :D



    I guess I'm just a bit grumpy because I could't attend the PDC and I still haven't got the Whidbey DVD... ;)

  • It looks to me like Whidbey is going to eliminate the code that's no fun to write -- the mind-bogglingly repetitive stuff you've got to do for every databound control, the trickery it takes to get a master-detail form to work right, the hack it takes to get good page titles with pre-Whidbey versions of Masterpages, etc.

  • Not to mention the awfully boring (although made a little bit less boring by CodeSmith) task of creating custom Collection classes. Egh! Can't wait to get my grubby little hands on those generics as well as the partial classes. Fun times ahead for me at least!

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