Back Draft
Savor the Hack
They've got a bad name, but hacks are an important part ofcreating the next wave of developer tools.
By Jonathan Goodyear
Have you ever wondered how magazines determine whicharticle ideas to pursue for publication? To be honest, the process is largelyunscientific. Elden Nelson (editor-in-chief of asp.netPRO) receives dozens of article proposals on a daily basis.Elden makes the final decisions, but he passes many of the article proposals byan editorial advisory board. As a contributing editor for asp.netPRO, Isit on that board, along with several well-known authors, developers, and acouple of people at Microsoft. If the board and Elden both agree that anarticle has merit, and the article's topic falls in line with the direction inwhich the magazine is going, the author gets commissioned to write the article.
The other day, Elden presented an article proposal to theboard. The content of the proposal isn't that relevant to this discussion, butsuffice it to say that it outlined a way to allow an ASP.NET developer to dosomething that isn't in the existing feature set of ASP.NET. A couple of theboard members dismissed the proposal as a hack. I, for one, took exception tothe term "hack" being used as a criterion for immediately dismissing an articleproposal.
An important part of a technical magazine like asp.netPRO is presenting "hacks" to get.NET to bend to the will of the developer. A quality article will present thepros, cons, trade-offs, and alternatives of executing such a hack, and willonly explore hacks that can be relied upon as (at least somewhat) stable. I wasa pioneer in ASP.NET page templates, which is arguably the biggest hack inASP.NET to date, when you consider the multiple versions I've created along withversions subsequently introduced by others. It filled an obvious need, though,and I still get reader feedback on my original page template articles, whichwere published more than two years ago. As another example, one of the mostpopular articles ever published by asp.netPROwas by Paul Wilson, who described how to enable multiple Web forms on a singleASP.NET page (see ManyFrom One). Besides enabling the functionality using a hack, Paul's articleoffered a lot of insight on how ASP.NET processes each page request.
There are two reasons why I think articles describinghacks are useful. First, they answer a question that many developers have. It'sbetter to have an expert teach readers how to best implement it than to allowthe spread of hacks that are unsafe or not scalable. Magazine authors alsotypically have contacts at Microsoft and exercise due diligence in researchingand testing hacks before unleashing them on the masses.
Second (and most importantly), the hacks of today'sversions of .NET become features of tomorrow's .NET. For instance, the nextversion of ASP.NET has a complete page template infrastructure built in.Another feature of ASP.NET v2.0 that started as a hack is database expirationof cache items. Support for multiple Web forms on a single ASP.NET page won'tbe implemented, but instead the ASP.NET team eliminated all of the known issuesthat made multiple Web forms necessary. Microsoft is really innovative incoming up with great features, but they are even better at responding to thecall of the developer community. When Microsoft bakes features into theplatform, everybody wins.
As the ASP.NET platform matures, hacks will become lessand less necessary. There are still a lot of features that just aren't thereyet, though. Microsoft knows about a lot of them, but as the saying goes,"Sooner or later, you've gotta ship." Microsoft is relying on the developercommunity to help them prioritize their feature to-do list. And what better wayto do that than to hack those features now? Rest assured, asp.netPRO will only serve up the best of them.
Jonathan Goodyear is president of ASPSoft (http://www.aspsoft.com), an Internetconsulting firm based in Orlando, Fla. He's a Microsoft Certified SolutionDeveloper (MCSD) and author of Debugging ASP.NET (New Riders). Jonathan also is a contributingeditor for asp.netPRO.E-mail him at mailto:jon@aspsoft.com orthrough his angryCoder eZine at http://www.angryCoder.com.
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