Seeing the forest for the trees

I’ve posted about Ruby on Rails before, although it just isn’t a good fit for me at the moment I still keep an eye on it.

Today I saw a post asking is anyone using the dynamic alternatives to .NET? (from one of the creators of RoR) which incorporated quotes and comments about how bad and slow developing with .NET is compared to RoR.

All I can say is that they must have been bad .NET developers.

From Christian Romney:

ActiveRecord is responsible for the great majority of the productivity on the Rails platform. If I never have to create another SqlConnection, SqlCommand, or SqlParameter object again, it will be too soon. Yes, I have rolled my own Data Access layer, but for goodness sakes, how many DALs have I built in the Windows world in the last 10 years?!

If he has written that many DALs, then why hasn’t he picked up the tricks of the trade? Code generation is the key here. When I’m writing a DAL, all the database related code is written by CodeSmith for me. More recently I’ve taken to using db4o – an object-oriented database that allows me to focus on logic instead of storage. Either of these remove a large chunk of the DAL headache.

Realisation

Proofreading this entry made me realise something I’ve never fully considered before – technically I’m the bad .NET developer, not those RoR converts.

Why?

Because I don’t do thing the “official” Microsoft way. I use the power and flexibility of .NET to get things done my way. I use the Data Access Application Block to virtually eliminate my database code instead of using SqlConnections et al. I use HttpHandlers instead of Web.Forms. I use additional components like Ajax.NET, db4o, log4net and others to enhance my applications. None of these are the “standard” way of doing things, but they’re the main reason I like coding with .NET (and Mono). If I couldn’t do this, then I would probably be as hacked off with .NET as others seem to be.

I guess originally learning to program in Perl taught me the most valuable lesson of all:

There’s more than one way to it.