technicalcreative

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Moving toward the darkside

A salient characteristic of my career at design agencies was a precise cherry-picking of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Mature assemblies, and the benefits they would afford, were totally pickable, therefore becoming a key part of any development strategy. Enterprise Library, a mature collection of libraries for getting things done quickly, was also quickly absorbed. The presentation layer was always the area of conflict. When you're being fed beautiful CSS and markup from designers, the last thing you want to do is mess it up. Hence, every server control apart from the Repeater and the Literal was out, ViewState was a no-no and postback was the devil himself aiming his pointy stick at your arse.

Thankfully, I'm living in a decidedly more secular environment, and developing for a consistent platform that you know everyone will have. Rapid project delivery is key, and a lapse back into MS Space on the presentation layer has been required. Necessity may well be the mother of invention, but it also allows you to re-evaluate approaches that you have abandoned in the past.

Intranet development is an odd thing. It's easier, because you do not have to pander to every potential browser out there, but it's also harder, because the requirements you gather tend to be a lot more involved. Pretty much every project I've been involved with is critical, in that if it does not work correctly, hundreds of millions of dollars could be lost. That's the size of our operation, and it is increasing every day.

As a consequence, I've found myself using a number of MS's proprietary tools - with much success. First up, the AJAX .NET implementation has been a key inclusion with my recent work. Sure, it's a little bloaty, but when you've got an extremely fast internal network, it doesn't matter as much. At it's simplest level, it's postback without the page refresh - on any controls you wrap inside an UpdatePanel.

The other thing that I've been incredibly impressed with is SQL Server Reporting Services. The Business Intelligence Studio that ships with > Express versions of SQL Server allows you to create powerful reports that clients love. I know for a fact that it'd fit every eCommerce site I've ever worked with before. Producing useful reports is damned easy, while the subscriptions component is the icing on the cake. Top, top stuff.

I'm aware that with my puritanical adherence to web standards in the past, many of my former colleagues may have barrack-guns at the ready. They would be wrong to pull the triggers at this point. My new discoveries amount to little more than technical Darwinism. If you're aiming for the entire Internet and therefore, implementing the tenets the W3 lay down and trying to maintain a respectable page weight, you can't go near .NET Server controls for client-facing software. In an environment where you know what you're going to hit, know what you're going to hit it with, you'd be a fool to ignore the tools at your disposal.
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Technical darwinism == Adapt and thrive.