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Best ASP.net Interview Question Ever (Part 2)

Comic Book Guy thinks "IE 6 - worst browser ever"Last time, I whined about ASP.net byte bloat. As long as I'm bitching about Microsoft's internet platform, I might as well hold nothing back.

Microsoft doesn't care enough about Internet Explorer. It is the red headed step child of Microsoft's internet platform. MS seriously lost a lot of client side credibility and goodwill by disbanding the Windows IE team for 3+ years after Windows XP / IE 6 shipped and letting the Mozilla / Firefox team catch up and surpass it.

I'm sure killing Mac IE & killing Unix IE didn't help matters either (not that anybody ever used them). Shipping a mediocre IE 7 along with a disappointing Vista last year, has further hindered Microsoft's ability to convince people that it does have a great server side web platform and annoyed its supporters. I'm also annoyed that after IE 7 shipped, the IE blog has been less informative during the IE 8 dev cycle than it was during IE 7's. I'm optimistic that after the recent IE 8 Acid Test post, the group is just being quiet instead of dead.

However, barring a Seahawk like comeback by the IE 8 team, my money is on Firefox 3 being the champ in the 2008 browser bowl. Ever since Coach Dave Massy left the IE team, I think they've taken a step backwards. Maybe they need to give IE to Coach Scott Guthrie (GM for all things IIS, ASP.net, Silverlight, and all other MS web technologies that don't suck) or perhaps the GM Windows Live team (Did you know Firefox development is almost completely funded by Google ad revenue?) All I know is that IE is too important to be left in the Windows group. Microsoft needs to show more forward progress and give the season ticket holders reason to be hopeful. Otherwise, IE will be like Shaun Alexander, a browser/back that has a great history and a disappointing present.

OK, I got the big 2 gripes off my chest. Here are some minor ones.

Why does ASP.net AJAX download so many Javascript files? I think there's a new ScriptManager on CodePlex that combines several embedded scripts on a single download. Still, it would've been nice if it was this way by default.

Why is HTTP compression the best kept secret of IIS? Seriously, it seems the vast majority ASP.net programmers don't know about HTTP compression on IIS. Maybe all of my friends read Dilbert instead of Jeff Atwood during their lunch break? OK, it is a pain to configure and providing some UI, like what Port 80 Software's ZipEnable does, would be welcome. People get nervous when I say edit the IIS metabase around them.

Why did I have to wait so long for a real FTP server? Oh well, at least things are better in IIS 7.

As I said, in my first post, on the whole, I'm pretty happy with Microsoft's internet platform. The ASP.net team is adding cool features at a good clip, Silverlight seems like a promising addition to the web developer's tool chest, and IIS 6 has been simple to use & rock solid in deployment. It seems like half of the ASP.net engineering team blogs, so getting that level of transparency is awesome. Visual Studio 2008 & SQL Server 2008 both seem like worthwhile upgrades.

And yet, despite all this coolness, I still have to code work-a-rounds for IE 6 bugs in my day to day life! To be fair to Microsoft, IE 6 was a great browser in 2001. Unfortunately, it's 2008 now and Microsoft fumbled away the web browsing technology dominance it once had. We're all stuck writing apps for a 7 year old web browser, that doesn't compare well to today's best players. Oh well, here's hoping that both IE & 37 will return to All-Pro form next season.

Print | posted on Saturday, January 12, 2008 9:59 AM

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# re: Best ASP.net Interview Question Ever (Part 2)

Gravatar left by Matt Lavallee at 1/12/2008 3:39 PM
Being an "old boy" of a ASP programmer myself, I've had my own love/hate relationship with the platform as long as it's been around. It's easy to poke fun at ASP now, but at the time of its inception (way, way back) it was a huge leap from the then "gold standard" of ColdFusion. Unfortunately, its evolution was stunted by the .NET "revolution" that occurred in Microsoft, most notably when ASP+ was killed. To this day, I think ASP+ would have set a better direction and made more gains than ASP.NET ever has. ASP.NET is the misguided attempt to give the WinForms guys an easy transition to the web world. What it actually created was a crazy, limbo universe where you have neither the hands-on RAD afforded by typical web development nor the stateful simplicity of a client/server app. But I've had this rant on my own blog, so I won't pollute your comments with it again. :)

HTTP compression via IIS has been a mixed blessing as long as it's been around (which feels like forever). Almost every time I've implemented it, I've run into cache problems that need to be considered in advance (like intentionally only using it in caching situations).

Silverlight is lining up to be one of the biggest advancements on the web since... well, Flash. Its XAML simplicity means you don't have to have a buggy IDE to create nice systems and, supposedly, MS is working the business use scenarios this year beyond simple multimedia delivery. This is probably the hottest creative thing to come out of Redmond in years.

IE8 should finally end the IE vs. Mozilla debates and leave it to a browser-of-choice decision. Having read the progress on IE over the years, there are some decisions that made sense in terms of IE6's non-compliant behavior ("do we antiquate 2/3rds of the web?"), but the steady path that IE7 set lines us up for the handful of quirks that remain between "the standard" (which is to say the proposal from a 3rd party, and not standard in terms of empirical use, which MS wins on its own) and the browser.

Love 'em, hate 'em, I'll continue using what I can, poo-poo'ing what I can't, and chuggin' along. It's better than PHP. :)

-Matt

# re: Best ASP.net Interview Question Ever (Part 2)

Gravatar left by Tim Harris at 1/13/2008 7:18 PM
Many times we forget how important it is to keep our fingers on the pulse of the times. Knowing others are advertising, the new technologies, and where the flow of money is headed gives you an advantage over others who are oblivious to such things. Can you think of at least 5 other ways to stay market-savvy?

# re: Best ASP.net Interview Question Ever (Part 2)

Gravatar left by Robbie at 1/15/2008 4:29 PM
True, ASP was a huge improvement over what we had before. Of course, to do anything interesting, you had to write COM objects to do the heavy lifting. It was all that in '96 - '97. Yeah, I have a love/hate with ASP.net web forms. I like how it handles validatiors, event handers, and not having to repopulate the form on postback is nice, but I think trying to make web programming stateful, was a mistake. I think term <a" href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html">Leaky abstration comes to mind.

If ASP.net control vendors like Telerik or ComponentArt, Dundas, etc, and others (MS Virtual Earth team) embrace Silverlight, things could get really interesting... I just love the fact that for a few hundred bucks or so and I can get high quality UI from some company, instead of re-inventing the DHTML menu. And if ASP.net MVC can get control vendor support, life would be that much sweeter.

I haven't any HTTP compression issues on IIS 6. Then again, I've only been using recently and I've heard it had issues on IIS 5.

Re, IE 6, I don't have problem with the non-compliant behavior because at the time, IE was defining the standard. The problem is the MS abandoned the IE platform, while the Mozilla guys came back from the dead like a phoenix. More troublesome, Microsoft has failed to get users off of IE 6, and onto IE 7, despite the fact it's free, has better HTML rendering behavior than IE 6, and works on Windows XP.
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