Enjoying book and a question on "independence"

kingscrusher · September 21st, 2010, 08:47 AM

Hi Imar

i am enjoying your book at the moment - on Chapter 3 now.

I am the webmaster of chessworld.net - an online chess site, which started as a classic .asp site. It has a number of technologies used including SQL Server, Javascript, Jquery recently (for drag and drop pieces), Ajax (for master collection in particular). I also have used a little bit of .net but mainly for back-end utilities like the Master collection for making use of the .net framework with respect to parsing and regular expressions.

I noticed a little detail on chapter 3 which I think has some significance for something I have been deeply interested in for a number of years when programming - namely the concept of "independence".

You see you mention about the HTML 'strong' tag. Actually this is an abstraction higher than font - 'strong' can have css attached to it, but font more strictly tries to specify size. I think the b and i HTML tags are also an example of the legacy deprecated HTML which seeks to deprecate old tags which were too tied up in the notion of styling, rather than the content and structure.

With respect to abstraction and independence in particular, I wonder what you think of the MVC trend recently. My friend Jan is also keen to start using MVC frameworks in PHP. Do you think .net is continally striving for "independence" - and that we should be adopting more strictly the idea of seperating models, views and controllers ?!

BTW, if you happen to play chess, please challenge me on my site, and I will make you an honoury member of course :)

Best wishes
Tryfon

Imar · September 21st, 2010, 09:01 AM

Hi Tryfon,

Quote:

With respect to abstraction and independence in particular, I wonder what you think of the MVC trend recently. My friend Jan is also keen to start using MVC frameworks in PHP. Do you think .net is continally striving for "independence" - and that we should be adopting more strictly the idea of seperating models, views and controllers ?!

Personally, I think there are a lot of good things in ASP.NET MVC. Working towards separation of concerns is often a good thing, especially in larger or more complex web sites. However, ASP.NET Web Forms (which is what my book is about) won't go away, nor do I want it do. Both frameworks have their own place, each targeting different scenarios.
Rather than repeating an existing discussion, may I recommend you read up a bit on the differences between the two platforms (if you haven't already) and people's views on the matter?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...l=&oq=&gs_rfai=
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archi...articular.aspx
http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_coop...-webforms.aspx

In other words, both can coexist, and you should choose the one that works best for your project, team, environment, skillset and more.

I find myself doing both at the same time, pretty much equally divided. That might change, or not... ;-)

Quote:

BTW, if you happen to play chess, please challenge me on my site, and I will make you an honoury member of course :)

It's been years since I played chess, so you'll probably kick my ass over there... ;-)

Cheers, and have fun with the other 16 chapters in the book.

Imar