Back Draft

Trimmingthe Fat

By Jonathan Goodyear

Askanybody at Microsoft when the next version of one of their products is going toship and you?ll most likely get the typical response, ?We?ll ship it when it?sready.? Although that methodology works well for matching a time frame to adesired feature set, Microsoft realizes that sooner or later they actually haveto ship software. That means slashing functionality to meet an establishedrelease date.

Microsoftrecently re-branded its next generation of Visual Studio (codenamed Whidbey) toVisual Studio 2005, thereby starting a countdown. The clock is ticking. Asexpected, on August 17th, the ASP.NET team went public with their opening salvoof cuts. I agree with some of the cuts; others I?m not so crazy about. I?llcover some of the highlights here.

I thinkthe decision to not ship mobile device adapters for the standard ASP.NET Webcontrols was a no-brainer. Microsoft had planned to deprecate the ASP.NETMobile Controls with the release of ASP.NET 2.0 in favor of the new universalcontrols. I was a skeptic of this architecture from the very beginning (see myFebruary 2004 column, ?ASP.NET 2.0: What Matters, What Doesn?t?). Although I think it would beconvenient to only have to learn a single set of controls, I just don?t see howthe same page could accurately and effectively render in both a browser and amobile phone or PDA. For those of you who still believe, Microsoft is leavingin the control adapter architecture. Perhaps some ambitious third-party vendorwill pick up the ball and run with it. For now, developers can continue to usethe ASP.NET Mobile Controls.

I didn?tmuch care for the idea of site counters, so I?m not upset that they got theaxe. Most serious Web sites have implemented a solution like WebTrends orStatistics Server. However, I am a bit upset that the DynamicImage control andthe Image Generation Service have been postponed. They were going to make itmuch easier to grab images from a database or produce dynamic images using GDIand display them on ASP.NET pages. There are workarounds for this, though.Microsoft has also included some sample code for an HttpHandler to handledynamic image streaming (see http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=667498).

TheDataSetDataSource was superfluous given the existence of the XmlDataSource andObjectDataSource objects, so that was an ideal item to discard from the ASP.NET2.0 feature set. Although it would have been nice to have a good-sized set ofASP.NET Themes and Skins out of the box (similar to what comes with FrontPageand PowerPoint), I can see why Microsoft didn?t want to waste any additionalresources on this. I?m sure several third-party vendors and independent Website designers will be quick to produce myriad free and fee-based Themes andSkins, even during the beta time frame. Microsoft will facilitate this with anonline theme gallery closer to RTM.

Mybiggest beef with the cuts to the ASP.NET 2.0 feature set is in relation to theAccess Data Providers (or lack thereof) for application services such asmembership and roles. The Provider framework is still in place, enabling athird-party vendor to add support, but it won?t be available out of the box.Microsoft has chosen to push the development community into using SQL ServerExpress Edition (the next generation of the MSDE database). There is no arguingthat Express Edition is far superior to Access in terms of performance and scalability,but I think the development community reacts much better when these choices aremade available and we are allowed to make a gradual transition.

Eliminatingcold turkey direct support for a database platform as widespread as Access (asfar as application services is concerned) is not agood move. Worse, I don?t think the decision was time-frame oriented. This wasa marketing move all the way. Besides, there are many small Web sites out therethat don?t need any more performance or scalability and are in a comfort zonewith Access, so why force it on them? If they need that kind of scalability,they are most likely going to go with a Web hosting plan that includes supportfor the full-blown SQL Server 2005.

Thebottom line is that I am definitely in favor of cutting out some functionalityto ensure that we get ASP.NET 2.0 sooner rather than later. Even though I havesome complaints, sometimes tough decisions must be made. Microsoft knows betterthan any company that you can?t please everybody all the time. The good part isthat although they are cutting some functionality, they are being careful toleave hooks in to allow you and me to jump in and finish it up if we so desire.That will go a long way toward easing any bitterness felt by the developer community.

Jonathan Goodyear is presidentof ASPSoft (http://www.aspsoft.com), anInternet consulting firm based in Orlando, FL.He?s a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and author of Debugging ASP.NET (NewRiders). Jonathan also is a contributing editor for asp.netPRO. E-mail him at mailto:jon@aspsoft.com or through hisangryCoder eZine at http://www.angryCoder.com.