Kevin Hoffman

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To be honest, my interest in AJAX-ified applications has actually waned quite a bit. Lately I've been so assaulted by overly interactive applications that I much prefer the subtle interaction best. I like it when sub-portions of the page refresh, and I get things like collapsible panels and such (all of which are available with ASP.NET AJAX) - however, 75% of the contents of ASP.NET AJAX is designed for things I don't see myself using anytime soon, such as the pure-client-side scripting model.

There are a couple of frustrations I have with it.

The first frustration involves resolving dependencies between projects. I am almost constantly able to reproduce a problem where my WPF application, referencing an Assembly in a referenced project, will fail to see the referenced Assembly, even though everything compiles. The fix? manually delete the .g.cs file, close all windows, remove the referenced Assembly from VS, close VS.. re-start VS, re-add the referenced Assembly, do a rebuild all. Yeah. That sounds like fun.

Secondly, and quite possibly the worst offense - auto-hiding dock panels. They really should consider renaming them to might hide panels sometimes but only when you don't want them to. I hit the auto-hide button on the Properties panel. It hides. yay. Now I hit alt-tab - the damn thing un-hides and sticks itself to the GUI. It won't even slide back away when it regains focus. The only solution is to click auto-hide again. twice. This is even worse when it happens to the GUI toolbar in ASP.NET and WinForms. 

Try this sometime: Create a UI where you need to drop something near an edge close to the Toolbar pane. Now, drag a button off the toolbar and wait for the toolbar to recede so you can drop your button. Oh wait... YOU CAN'T. You and I will be sitting there for the rest of eternity, contempling the rate of decay of our own flesh before that stupid Toolbar pane recedes.

I constantly have trouble with partial classes and WPF. (I realize WPF isn't RTM yet..but its RC1, and this has been a problem since 2004.. so don't get me started on that). It is quite easy to get into a situation where something in the code-beside (partial) class for a WPF .xaml contains a syntax error. Rather than actually telling you that you have a syntax error in the code-behind, everything appears to compile in the code-behind, and you get random bull#### errors in random locations in the XAML file. Unacceptable. 

Try this: do a "Build : Clean". Theoretically, according to documentation, this is supposed to remove previously compiled artifacts from the output directories. However, it doesn't. Sometimes I have even done a clean, then a re-build, the compile FAILED, and I've still got stale compiled executables in my output directory. Just yesterday, I did a Clean, Rebuild All, the build failed, I hit F5, and I ran an executable that I built an hour ago.

While I love my Visual Studio 2005, and you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands... It is still an unstable, steamy pile. Why do I love VS 2005? Because there's no other competing alternative that meets my needs. If Borland's IDE didn't reak of Java, I'd use that in a heartbeat. Maybe they've changed it with their new "Turbo" releases - I don't know.

Does anyone know if the beta of the Service Pack fixes any of this nonsense? It being a "beta" of a service pack, I didn't find it at all surprising that the installation routine failed and I can't even install it. 

tags: aspnet  ajax  atlas  

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