Monthly Archives: November 2014

When you’re Smiling

Every once in a while, I go back and reread the Reddit thread where they were first talking about Smile. Each time I read it, it’s a reminder of what I’m up against. There are a lot of interesting notions about what’s good in a programming language; everybody has their own pet feature: It has to be as fast as C! It has to allow infinite threads! It has to be 100% type-safe! It has to be type-inferring! It has to be designed for building web services! Did you see how X implemented generics!? And you’d better not leave out Intellisense!!!

It reminds me of back in the ’90s when I worked with this lady who was convinced that client-server would take over the world — by which she meant custom apps running on PCs talking to mainframes. Our worldviews and past experiences skew our expectations toward what we want, and the future often doesn’t play out the way we hope or expect.

(This is gonna be a long post, and I’m going to talk a lot about Smile, including some philosophy and history, a deep-dive into the core syntax, and a bunch of additional examples at the end. I feel like writing a bit on one of my favorite topics. Don’t feel obligated to read the whole thing.)

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ASP.NET WebForms Without The Suck

Time to Ruffle Some Feathers

ASP.NET MVC gets all the notoriety these days in the Microsoft web-programming world. ASP.NET WebForms is kind of the ugly stepchild, sitting in the back corner, mostly neglected. “Did you see WebForms last week? He was awful, just awful,” say the voices at the party. “But MVC! MVC is sooo elegant. And so smart! Did you hear she was given early admission at Dartmouth?”

Now, I’ve been coding for thirty years, and I’ve seen a lot of technologies, languages, and environments come and go. And Microsoft is a major, major offender in this category: They have a tendency of building these big, awful, overarching frameworks that make the U.S. Federal Government look under-managed, and then they drop them as soon as the Next Big Thing comes along. MFC was a horrendous mishmash of bad ideas that all managed to somehow end up in one ball of code. COM was a fever-driven acid nightmare that the computer industry has thankfully mostly wakened from. And VB — do I really even need to explain why VB is bad?

Which brings us to ASP.NET. Now I know that the original goal with it was to bring the VB WinForms programmers to the web and get them the heck off of the junky VB/C++/COM conglomerations that were killing Microsoft’s own abilities to fix issues in Windows itself. To that end, they came up with some clever abstractions that made the web sort-of vaguely smell like Windows programming for programmers who weren’t really clever enough or willing enough to get with the future.

And if you were offended by that last sentence, then you can stop reading right now, because this article is not for you.

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