Microsoft listening ?

This thing drives me crazy. Just have a look at this new feature and read the comments. I'm completely right there. Ok, except several spelling mistakes. It is frustraiting that people who play so important roles in development in MS are semi-anonymous on the web, don't have their own blog or post once in several months. Second, technical preview is available for download, so some of us are playing a bit with whidbey, and if I'm in front of the computer I can tell for sure if the certain checkbox is checked by default or not.

This feature is important. I remember back in 2001 forum posts about that finally we can separate our ugly asp inline code vs asp.net, with all the advantages that it gives: code separation itself, easy maintenance, etc. BTW, I coded separate even before I moved to Visual Studio.

The worst thing is that Microsoft worked hard to evangelize this feature in asp.net, and many people defended Microsoft (including myself) and this ideology of code separation. I had thousands of posts on asp.net in forums and hundreds among them on defending the feature of code-separation. And now as far as I can see from the folks that are playing with technical preview, they see it as if Microsoft is taking its word back about ideology of development in asp.net. "you will be able to create inline blocks of server executed script, just like in the old days of ASP". Why would I wish to write code in 2005 in the way I wrote it in 2000 and 2001 ? Or maintain such code after someone.

There is so not enough info regarding asp.net in whidbey. Seems Longhorn has a lot more info and evangelized better.

Related Posts:

• Google books ?
• Channel 9 ships
• RSS, Atom, OPML, aggregators, etc in one article
• Indigo and HTTP.SYS
• No 1 Lubarsky in Google
• Some HTML tricks
• DNS Blackhole
• IE CSS issues: min-height, max-width
• 095 is on the road
• Having Issues with .Text 0.9.5 Installation

I don't think Microsoft is going to make it impossible to do code-behind. Also, from what I've seen, even if you don't do code behind, you can filter the page to show script only, etc, so you have the same experience of code-behind without maintaining two files for every page.

Scott:
Codebehind is possible but it is not default right now in technical preview. Also all the codebehind/compile stuff itself has passed huge changes. 2 files for one page - this was the main slogan for asp.net when it was born in early 2002. There are many advantages of this, for example the ability to separate the work of asp.net programmer and html designer, whether or not it is the same person.

I honestly don't remember what build tech preview was. What I know is that code separation is on on the build I have. Please note, that tech preview builds are far from being stable and don't go through the same release process as, say, Beta builds. Typically we only fix serios blocking bugs for community tech previews. Hence on/off state of the checkbox you are observing may be just a bug :-)

Anyway - code separation is still available. I say 'code separation', not code behind b/c the model is somewhat different and relies on partial classes. Partial class, IMHO, is more convenient since you don't have to declare asp.net control twice: once in markup and another in the code.

I am far from defending either model, but I am for more options. IMHO (again) exclusion of a particular option for the sake of general Good (or ideology) is not particularly useful when developing commercial products. We are in business of selling software and hence should pursue what customers are asking for since otherwise we won't sell much. Options are everywhere. There are cars with automatic transmission and there are cars with stick shift. Hybrid cars and gas guzzlers. Film cameras and digital ones. LPs and CDs. End user (i.e. market) decides what is better.

I don't have a blog since I don't have much to write about and don't think I'll be able to mainain it and keep readers entertained :-)

Mikhail:
Thanks, I understand the point.