Some thoughts on re-writing monkeyType 2.0 in ASP.NET

Here’s just a few of my thoughts on having re-written my little blog engine (dubbed monkeyType) as an ASP.NET application.

• I hate to admit it; I love Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 (or whatever the fuck it’s called). It’s really got some very cool things going on.
• I fucking hate Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. (wait. but didn’t you just say…) yeah. right. well, for being such a great IDE, and doing so many things so well, it does some really stupid shit, too…
  • why in the hell does an ASP.NET project have to be opened (seemingly somewhat unreliably) via http?—I want to be able to double click on a .sln or .project file and have it open. I want it to be smarter than that.
  • why does it try an man handle my html, and want to say everything is invalid?
  • why is the syntax coloring so poor?
  • why does it do such awesome VB syntax checking in codebehind pages, but not do any in .aspx pages?
  • and someone try and explain to me why I need a .sln (solution) file, a .suo (?) file, a .proj file, and a .proj.webinfo file? Surely some of these could have been combined…
• codebehind pages for ASP.NET kick ass. Talk about separating logic from presentation… it’s just too bad you have to restart IIS (or at least that site) in order to re-read newly compiled binary files.
• the DataTable controls are cool, but i’ve found them to be pretty limiting. It’s one of those things where if you’re going to use them, you have to go all out. Not to mention they use <font> tags. (shudders)
• the ability to put a runat="server" in anything and then define it in the code as a HtmlGenericControl fucking rocks. No more if/then blocks in the presentation to hide things, just set id.visable=False

as soon as I finish rounding off the edges, i’ll finally post the source of the project. I dunno if i’ll set up a sourceForge account, or just open anonymous access to my SVN depot…