It's All a Matter of Trust
Now, if you're a .net programmer, you've probably read the title of this post and presumed that I'm talking about security permissions for what trust permissions are required to execute a .net app.
No, that's not what this is about.
I'm talking about trusting the developers at Microsoft. In most cases, they get full trust from me with the understanding that sometimes some things go wrong. But in some cases, I've had real trouble getting myself to go that far - most specifically I'm talking about auto generated code.
Dragging and dropping database type things on a form just feels wrong to me - I've never been able to trust that what it does is very good performance-wise. I'm not sure what it is, and i've never actually looked into it, but it's always felt wrong.
Web services is another place. The auto generated client proxy stub when creating a web reference makes some shocking classes to define the types going in and out of a web service.
I'm in a sort of interesting position here, however, in that my preferred working area is the back end, so data controls are something I've never had to touch. Sure, I like winforms (better than ASP.net that's for sure!) but the winforms stuff I've actually written have been fairly simple, or the complexities haven't required data controls like that - particalarly I love the property grid, which isn't databound at all. In fact, I'll make it clear - I don't even know how to data bind. I've never needed to do it :)
The proxy stubs have been easy to work around, it's just a shame I had to do it.
But today already I've been shown some things that has made me wonder. Earlier in Joe's talk, I saw what's happened to the proxy stubs generated in the 2.0 framework. It's not a whole heap better, it's nice to see the public fields have become private members with public properties wrapped around them.
And just a little while ago was a talk from Mitch Denny and the esteemed Mr Chuck Sterling. They did a talk on some of the flash new stuff in ASP.net 2.0. They had a whole heap of stuff going on - web parts, login controls, user controls, lots of different bits and peices. It showed stuff from a database, allowed new user creation, the whole she-bang.
And they wrote ONE line of code. Everything was drag and drop. And it all worked perfectly (I tell a lie, it all worked as well as you could expect when demonstrating on a beta product).
Is this a reason to start trusting more? Actually, no, I don't think so. When autogenerated features are involved, it should always be taken with a grain of salt...but I might consider looking further into it now :)
Listening to: nick randolph talk about the 2.0 compact framework.