Why ASP.Net sucks every day
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
do loose your mind in the jungle of Java EE acronyms ?
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
I've dabbled with asp.net a few times and never really got very far, it always annoyed me too much before I actually made any real progress with learning it. I've always pretty much known my way around plain html/css/javascript though. I recently tried out asp.net mvc (2) though and it's a whole new world. It puts much more emphasis on the html and give you much more control over it. So if you know what html you want to generate mvc is really the best way to go.
Simon
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do loose your mind in the jungle of Java EE acronyms ?
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
i ended up throwing out the ".NET" stuff (postback / session state / etc) and coding as i would in PHP or any other web language ... the sites run fast and are flexible and more importantly are designed to work the way the web works ... dynamic multi-language etc etc i think the basic problem is they tried to make a tool for developers who don't understand the web by making it seem like a desktop app type environment ... and of course it is a massive fail MVC is way more webby and you have to understand the web to use it ... which is as it should be i think you are right that asp.net IS the vb of the web :)
"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"
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do loose your mind in the jungle of Java EE acronyms ?
yep, you've definitely lost yours. If I were you, I'd go looking for it now before someone else finds it and stomps on it.
Pete
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
Amen to everything you said! Marc
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I'm not an ASP.Net programmer. Every time I came in contact with it I felt like I died a little bit. It's not ASP.Net's fault.. The notion of trying to build somewhat rich apps on a technology like HTTP just doesn't work. Like whipping yourself with barbed wire, it can be done, but it's needlessly painful and the supposed benefits are often not entirely well thought out. However, circumstances have me wrapping up not one but Two ASP.Net apps this week, and it has been a royal pain in the ass. A few of the issues. 1. Losing Tab Order on Postback. The last time I worried about Tab Order Bill Clinton was in his first Term. I fixed this but it doesn't work if someone Shift-Tabs out of a control. Fine I'll live with it. 2. Max Length doesn't work on Multi-Line Text boxes. Just plain doesn't work? Again, this isn't something I should be wasting my time on. Fine I worked around this. 3. Positioning of Controls. OK this is a problem with the Nature of HTML and tables and such, but I feel like when I'm laying out an ASP.Net interface I'm playing Jenga. Things just don't move or align in any kind of deterministic way that I can figure out. Yes, I'm sure that I could devote a few hours to figuring this out, but again, didn't we solve this probelm in about 1995? I have better things to be doing with my brain. Fine, I somehow stumbled on a layout that I'm happy with. For gawd's sake nobody touch anything. 4. Weird behaviour with Validators, ValidationGroups, CausesValidion and AutoPostback. I can't even go into the weirdness I hit with these babies. I posted the details in an question. Suffice to say something is definitely screwy here. If it's not a bug in Visual Studio then it's a feature that was designed by someone on crack. 5. If I am in a textbox that has an TextChanged event and I click save, the TextChanged event fires but the Save button doesn't. So I have to click save twice. Still haven't figured this out. All of these issues, every single one is a non issue in WinForms land. A few of the issues are entirely down to the phenomenon of PostBacks, but the rest are just plain bugs. I figure that I've spend about 40% of my time on one of these projects just figuring out stuff that would have worked fine if this was a WinForms app. Someone please tell me that this misery is ending soon and ASP.Net will be put to sleep in the great postback in the sky. My experience is that I can build ASP.Net apps, but I'm not sure I ever want to again. -Rd
I'm not so sure Windows Forms/WPF is perfect (though it is certainly easier). Just like your max length problem, the password character does not work with a multiline textbox (i.e., the characters are displayed rather than hidden by the password char). When I reported this, I think to the Visual Studio team as a WPF bug, they said it was a Windows issue so they'd let the proper parties know and were closing it. I have very little faith it will be fixed.
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I'm not so sure Windows Forms/WPF is perfect (though it is certainly easier). Just like your max length problem, the password character does not work with a multiline textbox (i.e., the characters are displayed rather than hidden by the password char). When I reported this, I think to the Visual Studio team as a WPF bug, they said it was a Windows issue so they'd let the proper parties know and were closing it. I have very little faith it will be fixed.
aspdotnetdev wrote:
I'm not so sure Windows Forms/WPF is perfect (though it is certainly easier).
WOAH!!! Hold on there. If rumours ever get out that I claimed WinForms was perfect, well...I don't even want to think about the consequences. I'd be uninvited from CurmudgeonLive 2011 that's for sure. WinForms isn't perfect. It's solid "enough". It's "good enough" software. It could be a lot better, but it's such a complicated thing how could there not be room for improvement? What I'll say about WinForms is I can get the job done and most of the time WinForms gets out of my way and lets me get on with it. With ASP.NET I can get the job done but most of the time ASP.NET gets in my way. I deliver in spite of the tool, not because of it. And that just isn't "good enough". -RD