My Portal Project

My first dealings with .NET back with 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks, made me feel that it was just Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with what J2EE had become. My recent work solidified that thought but .NET 2.0 has made me realize that Microsoft has started to make good use of the Lotus talent they have hired away from IBM.

.NET 2.0 goes far beyond just creating an application framework, and starts giving more power to developers by doing alot of work that used to be tedious. With an ASP 3.0 application, all of your authentication and administrative UI’s had to be created from scratch. With .NET2, the new application membership and role management capabilities make it extremely easy for developers to apply very granular control to applications.

The new IDE provides an entire portal framework using individual moduals called “WebParts”. They even now provide developers with easy-to-implement outline based navigators (old school for Dominoids). They have taken the idea of sub-forms and created a master-page / sub-page model that is equally as powerful and alot more flexible. Built in HTML validation and accessibility checking is now in and developers are alerted before the application goes into production. Even the cool idea of introducing code snippets as an IDE add-on is cool. Little things like generating a random number, iterating through a hashtable, string encryption, determining if a folder exists, are presented to the developer in a library and can be inserted using hot-keys.

They even created a control in the IDE that implements AJAX calls to the application without the developer writing alot of Javascript. But of course they had to rename it “Callbacks” in typical MS fashion.

I am only in the first 100 pages of the 1300 page book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 and my head is spinning with ideas of where we can use this technology. I am even going to get my wife to look into this because she has been worried about IBM’s direction with Notes and does not feel secure in her job. Showing her how easy applications can be with this product has peaked her interest.

I may not be a complete convert, but this is too damn cool!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Portals, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.