Even Microsoft Needs a New Development Approach with Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, October 29, 2006 @ 8:00 am

I'm sure you've all heard from various sources that the new Beta of Atlas has been released and that it isn't called Atlas anymore but ASP.NET Ajax. Lots of changes have been introduced, including the renaming of the $() function to $get() to allow it to work with other Javascript libraries. Maybe it's not quite Beta quality, says Rick Strahl in his recent post entitled More MS Ajax Pain. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Mr. Stahl, since he blogs from Maui, Hawaii, but I'm sure lots of other .NET/Ajax developers share his pain:

I've had one hell of a frustrating day going through my code and moving it to Atlas Beta 1. I'll get into specific issues in a minute, but my overall feeling is that this build is REALLY BUGGY. The previous ATLAS CTPs were reasonably stable and handled errors gracefully forwarding them to the client code. This build just crashes hard in many cases deep inside of client framework code. I've been at it for the better part of the day and while I managed to port all of the samples, just about all of them have one or two issues that I cannot seem to resolve completely without removing functionality. In fact, I've been doing that alot - skipping using framework features instead resorting to lower level JavaScript because it works.

Ouch! Rick goes on to detail the various specific issues he's had using the Beta. In my view, this isn't a fatal flaw in ASP.NET Ajax, just an early misstep due to the pressures to release something during this mad scramble to grab Ajax mindshare. The product and development process are still a little green and .NET developers and MS are feeling their way forward.

The truth is we're all still learning how to build, debug, test and support Ajax applications. See the various development tips from Ajax framework developers on how to debug applications festooned with Ajax widgets. New abstraction, inderection and other plumbing will make it easier to develop, but harder to debug and productivity is bound to go down before it goes up. It's been a long time since I've had any direct insight into Microsoft's internal development practices, but I have to believe they are struggling to find qualified Javascript programmers just like everyone else, just as I'm sure they're struggling to extend their unit, system and regression testing processes to cover the far more intricate logic on the browser.

At the end of the day, it looks to me that MS's approach of incrementally improving ASP.NET will be just good enough to allow them to capture the biggest market share for .NET Ajax. But TibCo GI, Echo2 (when the .NET version comes out), etc., all look to have more interesting offerings, IMHO, even for big corporate players who want to stick to .NET, especially if the productivity of their developers goes up.

 
  Technorati : ajax, asp.net, atlas

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Dietrich, overall I agree - I often point out things that are sub-optimal and it comes across as ‘Microsoft bashing’ which is definitely not the case.

   However, I think Microsoft really needs a kick in the ass with ATLAS because they are lagging big time. It’s been over year since ATLAS was announced and probably another half a year before that that Microsoft started work on it and at this point there’s not a lot showing for it.

   When Version 1.0 of MS ATLAS ships at the end of the year it will be an underpowered shell of what it was meant to be. The full ‘vision’ of Microsoft’s AJAX platform won’t come to fruition until Orcas ships apparently and this is why Microsoft is seemingly holding back on this initial release. In the meantime we’ll have a hobbled AJAX platform from Microsoft which means we’ll have to rely either on more CTPs (pre beta, flux, unstable) or go with third parties that are extending MS Ajax the way Microsoft should have done in the first place.

   Comment by Rick Strahl, Monday, October 30, 2006 @ 3:47 pm

2. 

   Sorry but I strongly disagree with that comment.

   I am currently using beta 2 of MS AJAX and it is most certainly not underpowered or hobbled. On the contrary it is very powerful, flexible and takes a pretty good line between appealing to the asp.net programmer who’s used to dealing with server side code, and javascript programmers who are used to the exact opposite.

   The only thing (as far as I can tell) which is missing from this release and will be included with ORCAS is better design-time support, intellisense and debugging.

   Comment by MrTea, Monday, November 13, 2006 @ 6:11 am

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