The Holy Grail of Software Development

A hairy title, I know...

But that said, I find, Jack W. Reeves essays as so at the heart of programming that I feel it is appropriate.
Also, like the Holy Grail Myth, these ideas are old (relatively), controversary and has been tried to be FUDded by Method Tools Software Industry.

So, if you want to get a grasp on what goes on when designig software, these essays are a must-read.

ASP.NET 2.0 EMEA Tour

I attended the ASP.NET 2.0 EMEA Tour Confererence at the Oslo Kongress Senter 28.02.2005. The presentations given by Brian Goldfarb was pretty good, and surprisingly honest for a Microsoft employee. He talked openly about internal discussions they had during development og .Net 2.0 and VS 2005. He has also this talent for writing code during intensive talking. That impressed me.

During he's talk he developed (well had the complicated stuff prebuilt), a demo app for ASP.NET 2.0 which demonstrated new features, as well as some bugs in Beta 1. The demo app and slides are downloadable from http://blogs.msdn.com/bgold.
I tried to run this app on the the december update of the Beta 1 (which says it's Beta 2 during install), but that did'nt work. I fixed the obvious things like Code directory should be named Application_Code, but that did not help. Also there seems to be several changes to the attributes of the asp tags. If I can get it to work, I may post the solution to this blog.

Master Pages and Web Parts is features that is very valuable to my current project, but, Hey it was about time Microsoft got these things into the .Net platform. Struts has had Tiles for ages, and I was missing these things when is started to use the .Net platform this Autoumn. I was a bit disappointed to learn that the asp-pages has to reference its masterpage. These things should really be configurable, and not hardwired.

Dag