More whining about VS 2005 and ASP.Net

May 04, 2004 @ 8:11 pm

I’ve been working on session for DevTeach using Whidbey and it’s killing me! As some of you may know I have some reservations about writing or doing sessions on early release software that is very likely to change. The topic – in this case Master Pages and Themes in ASP. Net 2.0 – is one that is very dear to me since I and quite a few others have spent a fair amount of time working around some of the version 1.1 limitations to build consistent site designs. I made an exception to my inofficial rule because I think it’s not a bad idea to get a head start on this particular technology and understand how it might affect ASP. Net applications in the future.

When I originally signed up for this session (sometime late last year actually) I was pretty sure we would have at least a beta to work with, but now – over a half a year later, we still have nothing more than a really, really buggy pre-release Alpha version to work with. The VS2005 Community build is certainly not stable by any definition. The framework on the otherhand does work reasonably well and works well enough to demonstrate coding concepts.

I guess I’m just whining right? After all, you can do all this stuff by hand. But, the reality is nobody wants to work like this anymore. Heck, not even the C++ guys do <gd&r fC++D>

I spent the better part of three days fighting VS.Net and get preciously little done. Sure the basic stuff works reasonably well, but when you have interaction between a few components it sure helps to have a development environment that supports you and currently VS.Net certainly doesn’t do much in this part.

In my installation for ASP. Net very few things work as they should. For one all the project templates do not work, so I had to add everything manually to the project and create files from scratch. Yeah, so what? Easy right – not really. With Whidbey’s new CodeBeside model things are easier but it’s not so easy to figure out what you need and what you don’t anymore for pages controls etc.

The CodeBeside model also seems like a big step backwards, back to the days of putting code and HTML markup into the same page. While the editor makes it so that code and HTML are separated, the model here is still declarative where you have to define things like imports and namespaces as markup tags. It just doesn’t feel right to do this. Instead of working with a ‘real’ class you work with an HTML document with script code embedded in it that the compiler declaratively converts into a class. For coding, I prefer a ‘real’ class with a class definition.

You also don’t compile a Web project – in theory you can just run, since the pages dynamically compile at runtime. You can precompile or run a ‘Validation’ step which basically lets you know about compile errors. You don’t loose functionality exactly, but it sure seems like there are more steps to get the same behavior we used to have.

Luckily it appears that Microsoft will go back to the CodeBehind model as the default for the beta – I sure hope so. I never really understood what was so supposedly difficult about this model other than the code clutter of the ASPX and .cs file, which would be easy to handle for VS.Net by sticking the .CS files into a separate directory. Having a separate DLL for the codebehind classes does not seem a big issue even if you have to update that DLL as a whole.

I can see merit for the single page model for simple pages in an otherwise non dynamic Web site for things like counters, logging, tracking etc. I’m planning on using more of this for my main Web Site which is mostly static. But if the idea was to remove complexity having all those special directories for CodeBeside doesn’t seem to make things less complex. If anything it makes deployment more complicated.

The worst issues I’ve run into have to do with VS.Net’s IDE. Over the last 3 hours I’ve locked up VS no less than 10 times. And when I mean locked up I mean REALLY locked up to the point where even task manager is slow to come up and it really is a task to try to kill DEVENV from the task list. Nothing like wasting 5 minutes trying to kill VS.Net which has taken over your computer.

I find it fascinating that Microsoft would put out software at this quality level. I know, I know, we’ve been warned that these builds would be unstable, but if you had a software product and you were in process of building a new version and handing out pre-release versions would you put out a product that has serious problems on this order of magnitude? Add to that the install issues I wrote about earlier which were obvious oversights? The community build looks just like a run of the mill daily build that was put out for public consumption. For a build that’s reaching probably a hundred thousand developers that seems like a funky policy to me…

Remind me not to sign up for sessions on software that’s not released yet. It’s not worth the effort. Let somebody else bleed for this stuff. I’ll play, but I don’t want the burden of having something to present that people go home with and only will find either crashing (environment or code) or be completely obsoleted by the time the next pre-release rolls around.

Serves me right – I should stick to my own values…

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re: More whining about VS 2005 and ASP.Net
by Mark Cliggett [MS] May 07, 2004 @ 10:25 am

Hi Rick, I'm one of the people at MS responsible for the tech preview (and your bleeding). I'm sorry about the pain.

I was in the process of writing this post
http://weblogs.asp.net/markcli/archive/2004/05/07/128148.aspx

when I saw your comments. It addresses some of your comments. You're pretty close when you say this was a daily build. It is reaching a lot of people, but the number of installs is much smaller - what we are trying to do is give people the option. I go into this in a lot more detail in the post.

You've also unknowingly given feedback on another recent post:
http://weblogs.asp.net/markcli/archive/2004/04/29/123355.aspx

where I asked about impact our openness (including these builds) is having on people like MVPs, trainers, authors, etc.. The feedback was mostly - "the openness is great!" but you are pointing out that it's not pain-free. I'd love to figure out how to make this work better for you. Reading your comments, I have some ideas (mostly having to do with communicating more and more clearly).

If you have time to read the two posts, let's chat - via blogs, email, phone...

re: More whining about VS 2005 and ASP.Net
by Rick Strahl May 09, 2004 @ 8:38 am

Hi Mark. Thanks for the comments. I do appreciate you taking the time to get back here. Overall I feel that it's great that MS is being open and providing more frequent drops. It seems like a great thing on paper.
But it seems to me it does everyone a disfavor to grab just a run of the mill build and put it out. It would seem wise to me that if a new community build is dropped (like once every few months?) that at least it installs successfully and runs 'reasonably' stable. I know I can't say that of the VsLive build (as I'm right now preparing a Demo for a conference that I can't get the WinForm designer to go through more than two menu modifications without errors in rendering closing down the designer).

Given the VSLive build failed right on install (with ASP.Net registry keys) it's pretty good guess that there wasn't any basic checking done, and that I think is not a smart policy to have. It gives a really bad perception and for those who were brave enough to do the install besides the warning jsf a really bad experience that will make them think REAL hard aout doing it again.

I understand that there's no way to do a beta quality release, but there's gotta be a way to put out a build that reasonably stable even if it is a few weeks old, but has been in use internally. Knowing that MS staff use Whidbey there all the time it should be possible to find a decent baseline to drop to the public?
Normally, I'd say - wait until things have settled, but the reason I wanted to install it is because I was ready to do sessions on a couple of topics. The issue is that with what MS shows at conferences and events is so out of synch with what is in the PDC build (last 'official' build). So getting something that is somewhat new and usable would be the main feature.

re: More whining about VS 2005 and ASP.Net
by Mike Schinkel May 18, 2004 @ 6:16 pm

Rick,

In general I love your posts, but I have to say I personally *hate* the CodeBehind model and much prefer the model in the PDC Whidbey bits. I really dislike having code & html seperated into two files. Now I agree with you that having to use markup tags for imports and namespaces is a kludge and the should provide a coding method for that, I don't agree that CodeBehind is a better way for everyone. For some projects, maybe, but for my projects, give me CodeBeside.

re: More whining about VS 2005 and ASP.Net
by Rick Strahl May 18, 2004 @ 10:37 pm

Hi Mike. I understand and that's certainly my preference. The thing is the CodeBeside model was already working in V1.1 really. the only issue is that VS didn't support it. So I also hope that VS 2005 supports all models, but I hope it's configurable so we can easily choose which model to use. I find for full-blown apps CodeBehind is just a cleaner model that maps closer to what you do in any other application. Flexibility is the key...