.NET Disillusionment

Messing around with C# and ASP.NET has been pretty boring so far. Apparently my boss really meant:

do you want to do take over another developer's project which is really just the installation and configuration of the Microsoft Web Portal Starter Kit?

instead of:

how would you like to do some cool C# stuff for fun?

But as a diligent, "pragmatic" coder I familiarized myself with the code and data model (damn ugly), created a nant build script (which is almost exactly like Ant BTW), cleaned up the ASPX and CSS and checked the whole mess into CVS. Ho-hum.

So now that I've been using Visual Studio 2003 for awhile I have some not so nice thoughts about it. It has some okay graphical tools for working with XML and XSD but I'm not really thrilled with the junk HTML it spits out. It really should be creating XHTML and use CSS where possible. Even Nvu does that! And how about some integration to a source control tool other than VSS for crying out loud? And don't get me started on the code editor. Maybe I'm just accustomed to Eclipse now but I sure hope Visual Studio 2005 is a lot better than this (Anders thinks so).

And today Visual Studio decided to start hanging on me. All I'm trying to do is pin the toolbox panel. That's it! I can just hear all the MS-loving developers crying out "just reinstall!". And normally I might. But unlike an Eclipse installation which involves deleting a directory, downloading a new version and unzipping, I get the feeling that a VS/.NET installation is just a bit more involved and not likely to succeed.

Finally, my mono experiment came to a grinding halt. My Nant script required a bit of tweaking to get the application to compile (needed references to the core .NET assemblies for some reason) but it just won't run in XSP (the mono ASPX server). I keep getting a null pointer reference exception but without the ability to debug while running in the Mono runtime, I decided it's just not worth the effort. Maybe Java's not so bad afterall...