I just completed another project contract on Friday. After decompressing over the weekend I wanted to write a few thoughts out about some of the successes and failures I’ve learned during this project.
Earlier I had compared NHibernate and SubSonic and chose SubSonic because it had migrations. I’ve done two projects, one using SubSonic and the other using NHibernate and I can now compare the features a little better.
NHibernate is documented better than I originally thought if you look at nhforge.com, not at the hibernate site. It also does some nice schema generation based on your mapping. You still have to go through “XML Hell” to map the site, unless you use another mapper or FluentNHibernate (which does the mapping for you in code) or another tool. As an ORM SubSonic feals cleaner and quicker since it generates the ORM classes from the database, where-as NHibernate generates the Schema from your mappings and ORM classes.
Making your users wait is probably one of the worst things you can do to ruin the user’s experience in your application. I have been working on an exteremely slow PC lately and have discovered some of the worst side-effects of a slow interface:
Naturally we can’t always eliminate every wait in a program, it is very nice to give the user some sort of visual cue that the application is still working and hasn’t locked up their computer. Probably the best example of this is an AJAX loading animation, or the hourglass in Windows. It’s a nice hypnotic animation that catches the user’s eye and prevents him/her from drifting off for a couple seconds.
It only works for a few seconds, but I was really surprised how well it works. Also, there are a few websites that generate nice ones for you here:
I’ve used them a couple times. For AJAX Dialogs I strongly recommend a nice big bar animation.
I recently bought a new Sony Vaio Laptop. Typically I don’t like Sony for much, what with all their rootkits and such. There were a few reasons I decided to buy this laptop though: it had 4GB of RAM, it had a wide-screen (1600×900) and it had a BluRay drive and it was under $1200.
To put it short, this computer is excellent for development. It’s got all the RAM I need to run Visual Studio, and SQL Server and even some virtual machines. The screen is fantastic and a great resolution for developing on. I’m a big fan of wide screens because I can fit more code onto the screen.
At my current contract I am saddled working with an intern. He’s a bright kid, and he’s gone through three years of school, but I’m kind of staggered by how much he doesn’t actually know! Development is extremely difficult because he doesn’t know much about JavaScript, AJAX, jQuery, CSS styling and positioning, Web Services, C#, UpdatePanels, LINQ, Ruby on Rails, MVC, DLL Libraries, ReSharper, and the list goes on and on! It’s hard to believe what eight years of experience teaches you, and I’m finding it difficult, and sometimes limiting because I have to move at a slower speed bringing him up to speed.
I was using some cool features of jQuery to do AJAX instead of using UpdatePanels, but when The Intern wanted to do some AJAX he got totally lost. In the end I taught him to use both jQuery and (despite how dangerous it is), Ihow to use UpdatePanels. In the end I encouraged him to use the UpdatePanel with his pages, read on to find out why.
OK, I know this is just a re-tweet, but in the light of my previous post on jQuery I figured I’d better post this too: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/10/28/rich-intellisense-for-jquery.aspx
It’s just a quick article on how to enable Intellisense for jQuery in Visual Studio.
It was recently announced that the next version of ASP.NET (4.0?) would ship with jQuery, and the new Beta of the ASP.NET MVC Framework shipped with jQuery as well. I’ve been using jQuery with ASP.NET for a while, so I wanted to post some links related to jQuery to help some other people who are jQuery noobs out.
ORM tools are probably one of the most time-saving tools for a web developer. Nothing is more tedious than building a data access layer, adding caching or coordinating transactions. Well okay, sometimes things like that are really fun, but when you’re trying to start a project out from scratch you want to get something up and running ASAP to show to your customers.
In the .NET world there are two powerful ORM tools out there, NHibernate and SubSonic. NHibernate is based on the successful and popular Java EE ORM Hibernate. SubSonic is an entirely new ORM developed in the Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord development model, with some nice .NET 2.0 features like Controllers that you can use with ObjectDataSource controls.
For a recent project I quickly evaluated both software tools, and I’m publishing what I learned here.
I’ve read the post from Encosia (Dave Ward) before, but I was reminded on the Twitter by MasterMaq about how dangerous UpdatePanels are a week or two ago.
Okay, UpdatePanels aren’t dangerous, but they do use more bandwidth and server CPU than a simple web service call. I figure a web developer ought to know what is being sent behind the scenes, but I can understand that a lot of people don’t. UpdatePanels require sending the ViewState and building the control structure behind the scenes, as well as doing a subset of the ASP.NET Page event model, which means more data being POSTed behind the scenes and it takes a little longer to do all that processing.
UpdatePanels are easy though, and for some things in ASP.NET it is so much easier to use. But Encosia does give us an awesome was to still use ASP.NET User Controls within web services and jQuery gives us some awesome tools to build pages dynamically without using UpdatePanels here: http://encosia.com/2008/02/05/boost-aspnet-performance-with-deferred-content-loading/. It’s not quite as easy to maintain as UpdatePanels, but it’s still very easy to use, and also very very fast.
Tags: ASP.NET
I’m finding CodeIgniter a little frustrating right now. I really wanted to use an MVC tool, but CI is not playing well with IIS. Also, the documentation really isn’t that great, even for an open-source project.
Alas, like most PHP projects it just wasn’t designed or tested with IIS in mind. Fortunately I’m discovering this relatively early in the project, but I’m a little frustrated that some of these things are coming up now.
I think given the choice, since the IIS setup was decided for me before, I might have push ASP.NET Forms (vs MVC) instead. Something I’ll keep in mind for next time.
Of course, CodeIgniter does work much better on my local Apache development environment. I don’t want to come down too hard on it. I’m just not impressed with how it works on IIS.
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