By day I've been a Winforms programmer for the last few years, but over the last few weeks I've found myself branching out. The first was to do a project with WPF, and there's going to be a slight problem going back to winforms now because WPF is so much better. Time to rewrite the main app I think (kidding!).
The second thing I've been doing is coding a website using ASP.NET. It's not something I've done much of before, and it's meant a lot of database work as well which is something I haven't really done for years but it's been quite the education. It's been nice going from writing desktop applications with horrific performance requirements that mainly stem from having gigabytes of data that needs processing as fast as possible and customers who want annoying things like supporting half a dozen synchronised videos playing back with overlays, graphics and things at the same time. In many ways that's a continuation of where I started programming, in embedded systems but all this web page stuff is a nice refreshing change. Scaling to lots of users is pretty much the same thing, but I've developed a paranoia about the database side. I'm constantly doubting myself and asking if that query is taking up too much resources, or if I'm making too many queries when I can merge some together cleverly in order to reduce load a bit more. The daft thing is that I have no performance problems and what I have so far scales way beyond the projected number of users but it doesn't stop the paranoia.
The other strange part to the site is that I've had to deal with browser caps. There's a very limited web browser that isn't based on the mainstream ones that needs to connect and it's been quite interesting seeing how ASP.NET can support strange new browsers through it's capabilities features. It just drives home the pain that having differing rendering engines look at your site brings. It's a bit of a joke that it's not all a bit more standard nowadays, even though it's better than it used to be. It doesn't help with how oddball this new browser really is, and how little chance I have of getting any rendering bugs in it fixed.
Still the site is almost ready for prime time but asp.net is looking a bit primitive nowadays, what with all the HTML and all. I could AJAX it up a bit, but I've got a feature coming up that needs a very rich API. Now if only there was some way for me to use WPF on the web... Silverlight here I come.
posted @ Sunday, September 23, 2007 12:36 PM