posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 8:19 PM
by
Benjy
(Not) Jumping into ASP.NET
Been meaning to blog about this for a long time now. Quite a while ago I came across this article on getting into ASP.NET. I'm sure a lot of people loved it. The average rating is 7 out of 9. Unfortunately for me, it wasnt what I was looking for. The application was a rather simple data-centric one and I happened to be looking for a good methodology on how to design a ASP.NET app from the ground up in a more OO manner (ie) once you get the object model done, how do you then map that to screens, navigation flow and all that. (The data tier is usually a breeze especially if you use OR-Mapping, but more about that later) and I was rather disappointed that it started out well with basic considerations and then jumped straight into designing the database.
I know there are times when data-centric will suffice and having started out as a DB person in my career, I will not criticise DB oriented apps right away, but it just doesnt seem right in this case. Im quite sold on OO and SOA now (but I do not consider DB's any less important) as the way you need to design business apps.
There are plenty of small sites with 2 page tutorials on how to design a product catalog DB and stick ASPX pages on top of that. I was hoping that there would be more from MS (especially in an article on MSDN) in the area I'm looking at. I know MS is moving away from UML, but a solid structured approach irrespective of notation would have been good (or is that not possible without resorting to UML at this point in time?)
Still, I guess the author had a certain aim while writing his article and it said what it was supposed to. As for me, I'll keep looking for a nice structured approach to designing ASPX web apps. (Probably all this info is scattered around in various white papers on MS and other sites).
Happy architecting /coding /hacking :-) !!