Rants against Whidbey and Community Leaders

Well, I'm back from my vacation -- we had a great time at Discovery Cove with the dolphins, and much more.  Now I've got to figure out how to rectify my very low output, without making just wasteful posts.  I've been skimming over all the entries about Whidbey, since its mostly all old news to me.  I guess that's the downside of getting early sneak peaks, and I wrote my articles back in October for the PDC.

So, is there anything of significance that I can share?  Well, first I want to raise my voice and join Jonathan Goodyear (and others) by saying that I too find all these hard-coded directory names for ASP.NET v2.0 very bad.  Like Jonathan, I too raised this objection at a private preview a very long long time ago (try October of 2002).  I think there are bound to be a few backwards compatibility issues no matter how hard the ASP.NET team tries to avoid them, but this one just looks plain stupid.  Yes, it affects me, since I have a Code directory on my site, but its not just me -- it even affects the ASP.NET Forums!  This just should NOT be allowed to continue past this beta, so please lets stand up and demand these hard-coded directory names to be configurable.

Finally, I have one more gripe -- this time against many of the so-called "gurus" of our community.  I suppose everyone has seen the many articles and posts about all the cool featues of Whidbey -- but have you noticed what's missing in many cases?  I don't understand how well-connected authors can write about things like MasterPages and not even acknowledge that its also possible to at least partially (if not mostly) use a version of MasterPages now -- in the v1.* world that most of us still live in.  I love to learn about the latest and greatest, just like everyone else, but I also live in the here and now, so while an article on MasterPages in v2.0 very much has a place, doesn't it also demand at least an acknowledgement about the present?  This is just one example, there's also lots of articles on ObjectSpaces (which failed to even make it to the beta) that don't even acknowledge ANY of the existing O/R mappers out there for .NET.  Again, I've picked these examples since they are close to my heart, but I've seen this "trend" in many many other articles also, and I'm talking about "gurus" that you would think would know better.  Don't these people bother to read other people's articles and/or blogs, or listen to others at the conferences and private previews they attend, or even just do a simple Google search?  I spent a few years in the academic world (not much granted, but some), so maybe its just my high standards, but I try to always actively seek to give others credit, and I know at least some others do too -- this is standard practice in the old world.  Shouldn't this also be expected in the new brave online world too, at the very least when it comes to those that we hold high as "leaders" for our community.  Shouldn't we expect our community "leaders" to actually pay attention to the community that they supposedly are highly involved in -- or are "gurus" just lone thinkers that should not be held up to old world standards?

Sorry if I've offended anyone, but I've been thinking this for quite some time, and it feels good to put it out there.  I'll try to make the rest of my posts less rant -- and I should have something interesting soon.

8 Comments

  • I am not sure why everyone seems to be oblivious about ORMappers and are only focusing on ObjectSpaces. As a working developer I am grateful for "gurus" like you who have provided code and solutions for such tools for 1.*. It is frustrating to realize 1.* is pretty much forgotten by many of the "gurus" out there. I am always looking for the proper tools to get the job done efficiently and it seems that the current answer is...wait for 2.0.

  • Paul, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one "turned off" by all the 2.0, Whidbey, and Longhorn stuff.



    I subscribe to a lot of "guru's" RSS feeds, and I'll tell you that I am tired of reading about all the great new stuff coming. I am an everyday developer of ASP and ASP.NET - I don't have time to play with RC's and Beta's and Tech Previews. Of course I like to stay abreast of future trends, but I need to read about stuff that helps me here and now. I need to know tips and tricks for how to do the things that I want to do now - not 18 months from now when I finally can get my hands on the "new" stuff.



    It's gotten to the point that 75% of the blog posts that get pulled into my News Gator are about ASP.NET 2.0 and Whidbey. For about 2 weeks now I've just been deleting them before I even read them.

  • I agree.



    I went through the Beta ASP.Net Forums 2.0 pretty thoroughly (written in 1.1) and you can see most of these "great features" that whidbey will bring implemented and working. I've since adopted most of these features for two key reasons:

    [a] hopefully quicker adoption of whidbey in my applications

    [b] some of these features are must-haves



    A couple examples in addition to the ones already mentioned:



    - Provider model (in fairness, there was a article on msdn about how to do this in the 1.x framework)

    - Themes

    - Strongly-typed and non-embedded resource files (this was a huge "must have" for us, and we definetly weren't waiting around for the fix)

    - Death'o codebehind (not as elogant as partial classes, but alteast it gets us in the right mindset)

    -strongly typed configuration files.



    If any of this sounds interesting, I'd strongly encourage that anyone look at the beta forums.



    Karl

  • Don't hate the players, hate the game.



    I'm out, yo.

  • Naw, I agree with some of the whidbey articles out there. It seems like everyone wants to be important, but I don't see them taking their time in their foundation before putting up the billboards.



  • Another little "feature" that gurus forget to mention is that Edit & Continue in Whidbey will only work for WinForm apps. So ano E&C in ASP.NET

  • Paul,

    Agree with what you said, but I have to give credit to authors such as dino esposito for the recent of making the same feature enabled in .net 1.x version and demostrating it in v2.0.



    By the same token, I would like to say that I am sick and tired of "community leaders" feeding me the fish. I want them to teach me how to fish!



    My two cents, Maxim



    [www.ipattern.com do you?]

  • I totally agree that Dino has been a pleasant exception. And I agree that's sad if the only times you see an MVP is to sell you something. I don't typically attend user groups, but I make it to other events, and I try to do the dinners and things.

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