In developing this new site, I've been trying to strike a balance between clean, RAD, and 'standards-ish'.

I know webforms really well.   I've also a more than passing knowledge of MVC... but can't shake the fact that it's VERY different from everything I know (webforms, winforms, silverlight/wpf, etc).

So one of the design decisions I made up front was to take a pragmattic approach to building the new site with webforms.

The rules being:

Viewstate is off.  Or as off as ASP.NET will let it be.  This effectively forces me to follow a very restful approach to page development with no crutch to rely on for ensuring the page state is set.   No fat controls.  The only controls I'm letting myself use are the core 1.1 era controls (textbox, label, repeater, etc).   No fat grids.  No uber this or thats.   With the ASP.NET 4.0 era control adapters, those core controls render clean Web2.0 html... which makes them easy to style (this being the main reason for the choice)....

Last year I took a new position as a manager of web development.  Yeah yeah... I'm the man now.

Really, it's not much different from being a senior developer or architect, except now I've got a budget (money to spend at my discretion) a mandate (some say in what gets done when) and like it or not, play a role in the health and wellfare of 10 fellow developers.    The latter point isn't as big a deal as you might think.   The way I see it, we all play a role in each other's health and wellfare at work.   Only now, I've got the added responsibility of 'seeing to it'.  If something is messed up at work in one of the developers work lives, I have to play a part in fixing it... and frankly, I like it.   I truly believe it is offering me an opportunity to be a better human being.

But I digress...

This new position is with North American Membership Group.  In a nutshell, they run several club sites for hunters, fishers, etc.   Each of these clubs has hundreds of thousands of users.   Finally,...

I'm probably one of the last developers on the planet to take a serious look at Visual Studio 2010 after it's release.   I worked with it for a few weeks a year and a half ago, and I found it quite slow, buggy and at the time... not particularily compelling.

I've found myself with a lot of free time of late, and I'm using the time to freshen .Net vernacular.   In particular, I've been taking a look at Entity Framework 4, and the rebadged ADO.NET WCF Data Services.  All the fancy 4 letter words and abbreviations aside, it's basically a fast and flexible means of getting data from the database and into your application as objects.   You create a nifty Visio like class diagram, gen a database for it, add some stuff (mostly boilerplate) to your projects and voila!    On the surface it is very RAD, very lazy (good), and seems reasonably fast.

The problem that's always been common among RAD tools is that often the border cases where their performance and lack of fine grain control were not in fact...

I'm a big fan of not writing code.  Or more precisely, a staunch believer that avoiding "not developed here" syndrome is the hallmark of a developer who has moved from "coder" into the realm of a professional wanting to use technology to help their employer/company make more money.

A great way to provide that value without the 'cost' is to buy third-party controls be they ASP.NET, Winform, etc.   We hop on the inter-web and see these super snazzy demo's which look like they do 99.999% of what we need them to do, look fantastic, and when comparing the time it would take to develop them to the cash it takes to license them... it's a no brainer... buy buy buy.

Then there bewilderment phase as you review the product documentation and try to quickly build a "hello world" app which fuses a bit of your current value add (say some company data) with the new control.   Everything is lovely.   Your boss pats you on the back and commends you for saving thousands in man hours.... until the day comes when...