Ugly and Inelegant

As the first step in learning more about .NET and presentation-level programming, my boss asked me to watch a training video about ASP.NET development. I was expecting some sort of 101-level intro to ASP.NET thing, but was extremely disappointed with the video. I honestly feel that I learned next to nothing from this, though it did raise many questions that I didn’t know I had, which I can answer with my own research.

The case for the DVD doesn’t say what the DVD is about, it only says it’s a free training video that will give you an idea of the company’s approach to training videos. The DVD itself has a small label saying “ASP.NET Using Visual C# 2005.”

The video opens with the cheesiest video of two guys talking about what they’re going to talk about. They have fake-TV smiles plastered on their faces the whole time as they read off their cue-cards, and they pause at odd times during their introductions. After a few minutes of this, they mercifully cut to video footage of a windows desktop and start talking about ASP.NET.

Now this is where I started getting confused. With no introduction at all, the guy opens a program I will later learn is Visual Studio 2005 and starts using programming jargon that I don’t really understand. In the first ten minutes, I have a hasty collection of terms that I need to look up later, and begin to wonder if the video is not intended for newbies at all, but for people moving from Classic ASP to ASP.NET.

What is the .NET framework? Is ASP not a language itself? Why is he talking about C#? What’s ADO? What are objects and classes? What’s the .NET assembly? What is COM+? What does it mean that .NET is object-oriented?

Just to confuse matters more, he seems to be talking more about the new features in Visual Studio 2005 than ASP or .NET. And the features he’s chatting up are really cheesy old-school WYSIWYG HTML editor stuff like creating and resizing tables for layout. Visual Studio seems to be adding inline styles everywhere, and for really stupid stuff, like to set the width of the table, it puts Style="width:100px" in each table cell. At one point, he tried to add a BGCOLOR attribute to the table (a feature he was VERY impressed with) and Visual Studio told him that attribute was depreciated, his reaction was that he could do it “a different way, if valid code is important to me.”

Aren’t programmers supposed to be sticklers for valid code? I thought that was one of the reasons HTML is moving towards XML, is well-formed valid code will make it easier to troubleshoot and debug code, which appeals to programmers who are used to operating in more strict environments?

At another point, he mentions that there’s nothing in HTML called a Label. I’m sure he was referencing some programming construct called a label, and not the label tag from HTML, which is used for forms, but it’s still confusing since the label tag not only exists in HTML, but would have been perfect for what he was attempting on-screen.

My favorite part, though, was that he kept talking about how hard it used to be in classic ASP, because you had to know HTML and CSS and even Javascript, and how incredibly difficult that made things, compared to how easy it is with ASP.NET. He may be right, but he sounds like one of those late-night infomercials where they show footage of someone trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without the fancy nightlight they’re selling, and he keeps stubbing his toes, or someone cutting vegetables without the fancy cutter they’re selling, and it hurts their hands to use the knife, and how did you ever live without this? Here’s a quote:

Many programmers avoided doing web development… and they just found that the web was such a pain. Everything seemed so ugly and inelegant. There was this CSS, and HTML, and all this funny script going on, and it was just a very dischordant environment to program in – A very unproductive environment for many people to program in, compared to their experience in Windows.

Anyways, about the only thing I managed to learn from this video is that ASP.NET is compiled code, rather than interpreted code, which means that validation and debugging is much easier. At the very least, though, all the questions that this video raised give me a good point to start some of my own research to learn about ASP.NET.