Karma

Posted by Jeremy Miller on July 26, 2006

If you’re as big a fan of My Name is Earl as I am, you’ll understand me when I say that Karma is punishing me today for the ASP code that I wrote circa 1998. I’ve been messing with some legacy ASP code that wasn’t working in one environment, and had to resort to this

On Error Resume Next
‘ Do stuff


If err.Number <> 0 Then

  Response.Write “Number = “ & err.Number & “<p>“

  Response.Write “Description = “ & err.Description & “<p>“

  Response.Write “Source = “ & err.Source

  err.Clear

End

I’ve been bad mouthing ASP.Net lately at work and in user groups (and RoR is just so shiny and new), but give me ASP.Net over spaghetti code ASP and VBScript any day of the week.

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • David

    Oh, there’s plenty of spaghetti ASP.NET out there too. And, although RoR leads you in the right direction, there are a lot of people who still do layered apps wrong wrong wrong.

  • http://www.hdri.net cmyers

    Jeremy,

    I’ve been reading about ATLAS a lot lately, and was underwhelmed. I started digging in tonight and… wow. It has the potentially to completely change how ASP.NET is developed (i.e. toss out the whole server-control, post-back, page-control-lifecycle, viewstate crap).

    get this:
    1.) Real, honest-to-god objects on the client side, hooked declaratively (or programmatically if you swing that route) together, easily unhook-able and test-able.

    2.) Complete separation of concerns w/r/t view and “presenter” (which, for the most part, goes away, or exists in a limited form). All model access is done through web services or these quasi-services thing they have in ATLAS

    3.) Much easier to integration test since there’s not a lot of random bits of JS lying around, it’s all bundled into ‘components’ which you can isolate, mock-around (JS is the premiere mocking language, after all), and test.

    The MS hype, like normal, focuses on passing DataSets around using SqlDataSource (UGH!) and fancy drag-and-drop panels and auto-complete textboxes, but those are just marketing gems, the core technology is actually very exciting.

    You can have your pure, unadulterated HTML tags (yes, true input type=text tags!) without (much) asp:Foo junk going on.

    We’re doing a big TDD, IoC, MVP project right now and it’s going really well, but the rubber-meets-the-road between ASP.NET and HTML is still somewhat challenging to code, let alone test (— oops, I mean Test, let alone code :) ). I have high hopes that ATLAS will help solve a lot of the nasty problems facing TDD ASP.NET coders today. ATLAS is not just AJAX hype, it’s so much more ON TOP of AJAX.

    Call me kool-aid drinker, but I think we may have a winner here. Don’t give up on ASP.NET completely yet.

  • jmiller

    One word Harris: JSUnit

    Actually, Visual Studio.Net debugs Javascript fairly well. Or grab the Firefox dev tools that let you manipulate Javascript on a running page.

  • http://hrboyceiii.blogspot.com Harris

    Man that sent chills up my spine. It’s almost as bad as trying to debug JavaScript – but that’s just my lack of experience with it…