Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Classic ASP.NET: improper abstractions and ruined REST

http://herdingcode.com/?p=183

1. No one ever anywhere answered the simple question: how to avoid POST operations in a classic ASP.NET when GET operations should be used instead according to a common sense and REST.
POST - for changing data, GET - for reading. No one found any decent way to avoid "Web page was expired"  messages resulting from improper usage of POST. No way to PRG.

To me, this fact alone makes “classic” ASP.NET’s Web Forms approach inappropriate.

2. Yes you can find a workaround for anything, but you’re ending up battling against a framework rather than using it most of the time. And maybe even worse: you’re battling against MS tutorials and books which teach you that ASP.NET-in-24-hours-dataset-no-custom-code-monolithic development.

3. It’s pretty obvious to me, that event-driven model moved from Windows desktop development to Web does not correspond to Request/Response nature of Web and makes programming much more complicated, than even with a plain old ASP. I’d be pretty happy to have lain ASP + C# 3.5 + Intellisense, and believe me, my code would be at the same time more user-friendly and better structured than monstrous code-behind of those ugly master/detail ASP.NET pages.

4. I have nothing against Http Modules, Handlers, etc. They are powerful tools.
But I personally hate Web Forms so much, I think that all those words about Web Forms better in one situations and MVC in another is just a precaution: people understand that MVC is better but are afraid to talk.

Finally, everything is already said in this article and all the comments below.

Monday, June 01, 2009

“Mega” menu? Is it like almost unusable Office 2007 menu?

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen thinks that “mega” menus are good. But is it something similar to Office 2007’s “ribbon” menu?

Office 2007 menu is awful. It's a major step back from a standard and simple Office 2003 menu. Really hard to find what you need, you never sure which main menu bar link to click. My daughter told me to uninstall Office 2007 from her machine because she cannot find anything. If "mega" menu is something like that, I strongly disagree with Jakob Nielsen. The less pictures and other unnecessary graphical elements are in a menu - the better it is.