So, I’ve spent ages trying to learn to code on an Android.  I’ve read a few books.  I’ve got my dev environment all set up.  I’ve coded a few test apps and put them on my phone.  But the going is slow.  If I were a Java developer, I’d probably be all over it.

A friend asked me to do a quick Windows Phone 7 app and I could not believe how easy it was.  Since I’ve been working heavily with Silverlight for the past few years, I know most of the code already.  I had to do minimal reading to get a full app up and running.  It was was nice to work in Visual Studio again.  Using Resharper, I was flying through the code.

I only wish more people had Windows Phone 7. 

I would get a phone myself, but 3 things are holding me back currently:

1. I don’t want to be one of 5 people in the UK with a Windows Phone 7.
2. It’s not open, like Android is.  I would be at the mercy of the phone manufacturers for upgrades (like with an iPhone).
3. It doesn’t have expandable memory (to my knowledge).
4. My current contract isn’t up until April.

But it’s nice to be able to write apps so quickly (since I spent so much time learning the trivial details of Silverlight).  Maybe.

For me, the sign of a good web developer (or web application developer) is someone who can right-click a web page to view the source and tell you why he did things the way he did.  “I used this div to position this element over here, and used the unordered list for a sub-menu, . . . “

A bad web developer is someone who says “It looks fine in my browser” and “Well, I’m not a designer . . . “

One of the biggest crimes of ASP.net Web Forms was to strip HTML skills from new web developers.  They view the source of their code (in the browser—not Visual Studio) as gobbledy-gook.  And ASP.net ensures that it is.  It’s full of ViewState and control names like ctl_100_className_ctrlName which the developer didn’t put there.  It tried to remove the whole stateless-http challenges and make web development accessible to desktop developers.

I’m so very pleased every time I see a new site created with the Microsoft MVC Framework.  MVC is making up for the ASP.Net webform crimes.  Just like Ruby  on Rails or PHP (or classic ASP), it allows the developer to think about what gets sent from the web server to the browser.  When I do a site in MVC framework, I can view the source and recognize my own handy-work.  I can make full use of CSS3 and jQuery.  I know that everything in my user’s browser is something I put there intentionally.

CSS, Javascript, and HTML (along with images, flash movies, Silverlight, or other plugins) are the ingredients of any web application.  Server languages like ASP, PHP, and Ruby are only tools to deliver these ingredients to the browser in unique and creative ways.  A good web application developer (like a good chef) can look at his source and tell you exactly what everything does.  ASP.Net webforms are like ready-meals.  Everything is done for you, but you don’t really know everything that’s in it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve known some fantastic ASP.Net devs who build apps free of ViewState and server controls.  But I’ve worked with too many who could drag a control onto a web canvas, set a few properties, and call themselves web developers.

I recently worked on a DotNetNuke project where we customised a third-party component.  The page was not rendering as it should.  ViewSource gave me a bunch of ViewState and nested tables.   I knew of a 100 ways to get css to make the site look the way I wanted, but this wasn’t my source.  It wasn’t even the developer’s source—it was the clientIds of the server control.  Since I was struggling, a web guy (proper Mac-using, firebug-toting, standards-compliant, web guy) asked to see the source so he could suggest something.  When he saw the source, he was mortified.  I was embarrassed –“It’s not mine!  I didn’t write it.”  In the end, I hacked it with jQuery.  I didn’t have the sourcecode to modify it properly. 

The legacy of Web Forms lives on.  Sharepoint 2010 is full of it.  Young Microsoft developers (in the last 5 years or so) know nothing but how to use WebForms.  (An ASP.net dev told me a few years ago “But I don’t know html.”).  But, hopefully, one day we will get around this idea of creating tools that “do everything for you” for developers who should know to do it themselves.  Just like I wouldn’t create ready meals for people who call themselves chefs.

I’ve been looking at CMS systems a lot recently.  Here are some of my thoughts:

DotNetNuke

I’m using DotNetNuke for a contract right now.  Although it’s written in Asp.Net and I can code in that easily, it’s a pig to run.  Even version 6, which was released last week, seems sluggish when run in the browser (even on my local machine with 8gb ram). 

DNN is advanced—don’t get me wrong.  There is no lazy-ness there.  In fact, there is so much available in DNN, that it pains me that it runs so slowly.

It’s an okay platform.  But compared to MVC or PHP counterparts, the ASP.Net webforms are still far too slow and lack elegance.  DNN will always have that Asp.Net webform dependency hanging around its neck.

Orchard

Orchard is a new CMS which was started by Microsoft.  I fell in love with it last month.  It’s based on MVC3 with the razor engine.  It supports multiple sites, just like DNN.  There aren’t many extensions or themes, but it’s written in C# so I can easily create what I need.

But, then . . .

But then I looked at the page source after it has been rendered in the browser.  Although it doesn’t have a lot of ugly ViewState like DNN (and all other webform pages have), it does include a lot of stuff that I didn’t put there.  There is huge amount of javascript added which would at least triple the size of my source.  The beauty of MVC is that I have more control of the html—but Orchard adds a stunning amount of code.  Most of it is serialised model information—but I’m not sure why it is on the client.

This really bothers me because I spent a lot of time working with Orchard.  It is not easy to use as an Admin.  While DNN is simple and I could give it to any client to customise, you have to really study Orchard just to add a few things onto a page.  You can’t just add something to a sidebar, for example, you have to create a layer and add a shape, and add some code so it only shows when a page uses that layer or shape.  Really, it was ridiculously difficult.

So, Orchard adds too much to the source and is too difficult to use.  But, in terms of speed, it is very fast.

Joomla

Okay, Joomla is PHP.  I’ve done PHP projects for clients before, so I’m fine with that—but I prefer C#.  I looked at Joomla and Drupal just to see how they compare.

Joomla puts the .net CMS alternatives to shame.  It is easy to set up, the code is very current, and it delivers pages super-fast.  The admin interface is not as easy to use as DNN (in my opinion), but much easier than Orchard.  There are loads of themes and extensions available.  When I did a viewSource, all the html was what I expected it to be.

Why can’t the .net projects be this good?

One thing I hear a lot in my contracts are developers comparing .Net, PHP, and Java (and sometimes Rails).  DotNet developers always say .Net is better.  PHP and Java developers talk about how sluggish .Net is and how it is inferior because it requires being hosted on Windows (except for Mono—but who really uses that?).  The truth is, all these languages pretty much do the same thing—they deliver HTML to the browser.  You can write a site in any language and it wouldn’t matter.  I’ve seen .Net sites outperform PHP sites (but unfortunately, it is the other way around). 

I’ve looked at other .net CMS systems lately too (Umbraco, Sitefinity, etc) and didn’t like the look of those enough to even install.

I might start using Joomla.  Page speed is far more important than how easy it is to code.  Hopefully, someone will write a decent .Net CMS system one of these days.

So, I watched the Silverlight Firestarter keynote where some of the Silverlight 5 features were revealed and have to say that it all looks really good. 

There were some pretty impressive interfaces demo’d. 

I’m so tired of hearing how Microsoft is dumping Silverlight.  The keynote alleviated some of those fears, I hope.

The biggest benefit, I think, will be the ability to put breakpoints in xaml databinding.  Most of the Silverlight problems I have are trying to figure out if the INotifyPropertyChanged event was fired for an element in my gui. 

So, life will be easier . . . by the end of next year.

After my initial resistance to using Silverlight, I have to say that I have been using it heavily for the past month and am very impressed with it.  When I look at Silverlight as a web technology, I am amazed by the stuff you can do with it and how extensible it is.

My apprehension was due to web standards.  And I still have concerns here.  Microsoft had a big win when they got SL to work on Macs as well as Windows.  But the lack of a Linux version still bothers me (the Mono guys are working on this).  The biggest blight on the technology is lack of iPad support.

I like HTML and I feel comfortable with it.  When ASP.Net webforms were released 10 years ago, I felt Microsoft were trying to bring a Visual Basic-type development experience to the web.  I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve met who profess not to know html.  They only know the very basics of html and a bunch of tags like <asp:Button>.  With php, classic asp, and the new MVC framework, you have more control of how your page renders in different browsers because you wrote the code to do it.  I guess I’m a purist in this area.

But Silverlight is not html development.  It’s also not flash.  It’s more like writing a client application which runs on the desktop—but has to play safely in a web sandbox.  The rules are all different.  All calls back to the server are asynchronous and you can’t stop and wait for them.  Binding is very heavily used, and the code-behind works better than in ASP.Net because there are no postbacks required.

In the past month, I’ve really geeked out.  I spend most of my time thinking about the project I’m working on and how I can improve it.  I’m reading my fourth book on Silverlight in the evenings and spending the days coding away.  You might think that’s sad (it has been said to me), but I’m really enjoying it.  It won’t last forever, so you need to take full advantage of enthusiasm when you get it.

Anyway, I take back some of the things I said before about Silverlight. 

The scary thing about Silverlight is that you are one security threat away from losing your clients.  One thing that I’ve thought a lot with the problems on IE lately is that people who wrote “Only-for-Internet-Explorer” websites did not give their users the option to switch browsers if they felt unsafe due to all the security flaw hype.

A little common sense and a knowledge of web standards and it’s easy to write HTML that will look good and be functional in all browsers.  Still, in my experience, too many developers are choosing a platform and sticking with it—most of the time that is IE.  It’s easier to test one browser, it’s easier to tell a user to use the browser that’s probably already installed on their pc.

Flash and Silverlight are different than HTML—they are runtimes which are allowed to run inside the browser—kind of like how Java applets used to be able to.  They are executables which run compiled functionality on your computer.  They are cross-browser—but not like html is cross-browser.  When I look at a Silverlight or Flash app on my pc, it’s always the same runtime working.  Silverlight is a few years old and really starting to look like Flash—allowing Microsoft developers like me to get more fancy and provide far better functionality for our users.  Silverlight runs on Windows and Mac, but has ignored the Linux landscape (there is an open-source Silverlight runtime called Moonlight being developed for that—but I consider it a snub).

In the world of web development, I think Flash and Silverlight are “cheating” at cross-platform compatibility.  Everyone has accepted Flash (except the iPhone/iPad), but the jury is still out on Silverlight.

Silverlight and Flash are great in that they move a lot of the processing to your computer and free up resources on the server from which they originate.  But they also increase the responsibilities of they client over the server.

Security flaws are found all the time.  We all scramble around and try to fix them when they come up.  As a software developer, I like the idea that I can apply a patch to a server and be done with it.  With client driven app, I need to make sure all of my users apply the patch (and do it in a way that lets them know that the app is safe—and not to panic).  Flash could bounce back from it (“You need it for Youtube, too. You should apply the patch”), but Silverlight is too new.

I’m often seduced by the cool things that Silverlight can do.  I’ve played around with it a lot and have written several small apps (including an animated Overpass ad on my blog), but I’m not ready to jump in head-first yet.