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One attendees notes of the Ottawa .NET Community's (ODNC) Season Kickoff Meeting
Posted: 20 Oct 05 8:44 PM (N/A) |
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These are my notes from the meeting. I put this up for anyone who missed the meeting and also for anyone else to correct or add to my notes. Much appreciated. You can "Wiki" it.
Tapper
Main topic: Best Practices for Developing ASP.NET 2.0 Web Apps
Main speaker: Bill Baldasti
Date: Oct. 19, 2005
The Intro Speaker, Nigel Shaw, couldn't make it so we didn't hear anything about Software Factories.
Main speaker, Bill Baldasti (bbaldasti@infusiondev.com, (416) 595-4069), was a knowledgeable, dynamic speaker and I enjoyed his talk. Here are some notes I scribbled down:
- Design Patterns are important but he focussed on Anti-Patterns. It's important to know what NOT to do to avoid some of the major design flaws.
- Golden Hammer: A developer knows one technology really well and uses that to solve every problem.
- Input Kludge: Monkey testing.
- Demonstrated the use of Master Pages: Essentially, a master page is a user control that enhances design time development.
- In ASP .NET 2.0, a developer no longer needs to install and run IIS in order to run and debug their web apps. Visual Studio has its own mini web server.
- Essentially, ASP .NET 2.0 has a lot of new features and helpful utilities that are a direct result of the many customer complaints Microsoft received over the years. For example, though you can still do it manually, you no longer have to directly edit the XML file called web.config. There's now a convenient GUI to do that.
- As part of his "Anti-Pattern" theme, he brought up the pitfalls of using the Application and Session objects. Use the Session object only when you must. The Application object is a bit buggy and should not be relied upon. You have to worry about and manage locking issues when you use it. An alternative to the Application object is the Caching Framework. It is thread aware and you don't need to worry about locking.
- The toolbox has been greatly expanded to include many more new features. Won't list them all here, but for example, there are "Webparts" that you can drag and drop onto a page to build portals quickly. Other useful prebuilt component frameworks that you can drop onto a page include login page, sitemap and cookie trails.
- Renaming a class. When he showed this, it actually got a "Wow" from the audience. It was more like one of those "well it's about time!" reactions. When you rename a class, VS checks everywhere else and renames it. It makes changing class names easy.
- Among the many new file types you can create, you can create "Theme" files. These are really souped-up CSS pages.
- A note on IIS 6.0. He encourages upgrading to IIS 6.0 because it was re-written from the ground up with ASP .NET in mind.
- He took some time in demonstrating the concept of the Model View Controller (MVC). The model part is the business logic code, the view part is the GUI and the controller part is what goes between the M and the V. He first showed us that many of us (myself included) have been guilty in the past of dropping a button onto the design view, double clicking the button to open up the event method on the class file and then proceed to code the heck out of that method. MVC tells us to factor out the business logic into another class to form the M part of MVC and the event method becomes the C part. This simple change allows for better code reuse. In addition, this better practice leads to the next point, easier unit testing.
- There's a utility that allows you to easily unit test your app. And using good coding practices as outlined above to isolate business logic into reusable packages, it can facilitate for better unit testing.
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Re: One attendees notes of the Ottawa .NET Community's (ODNC) Season Kickoff Meeting
Posted: 23 Nov 05 9:02 PM (Canada) |
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Tapper
I really like the way you summed up Bill's meeting. Well done! We don't have a wiki on the Community WebSite but maybe we should consider strapping one on. In the interim, maybe we should consider putting your reports in a more prominent location. Any interest in being a .NET correspondent for the ODNC? Keep up the good work....
Orest |
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