VS.NET 2005 Projects Take Two Steps Back
Like good little microsoft junkies, we’ve been transitioning all of our development to .NET 2005, including using their new flagship IDE, VS.NET 2005. In our initial transition, we ran into huge headaches trying to import our old ASP.NET projects, particularly when heavily divided into namespaces. We eventually sorted all of these things out, but it spoke volumes about their mysterious transformation to a seemingly dumbed-down project model.
Today, when setting up a new web project from scratch, we noticed something else quite shocking: there’s no default namespace declaration in the project properties. I tend to give my code lengthy namespaces that match with the subversion URN (something like com.atzok.myclient.projectawesome), so having these create by default, along with the directory path to the file from webroot, saves a bit of typing and hassle.
But typing isn’t my big concern, here. I’m all for Microsoft throwing off the shackles of conventional development that could hold us back, but namespaces? The reason I have to go through so much to use them is obviously because Bill doesn’t want me to. They expect me to just cram all my business logic in their stupid app_code directories and never look at it again? I must be missing something, because it all flies in the face of the project architecture books I’ve been reading to study for my MCSD.
Fortunately, Microsoft seems to be backpedaling as usual, and has released an update to introduce Web Application Projects. These are basically old VS2003 projects that work in VS2005. A little late for most of our project migrations, but I suspect anyone who hasn’t yet done so will be using these.
Of course, that brings up another problem: if the VS2005 Web Project really is a significant and useful paradigm shift, why are they letting us stay behind it with WAPs? I’m guessing because it’s not. Microsoft is surely as succeptable as any other tech company to visionary lead programmers going down a noble but impractical path.
