Why isn't this easier than it is?

After a monthlong impromptu blog hiatus, I am back. I owe most of this drought to laziness. It comes down to this. You have to always be posting. You have to keep doing it, no matter what, even if what you write isn't worth caring about. Just...keep...writing. For those of you looking for some useful and/or interesting content, I am sorry. You may need to check back in a few months.

So, over the past month, I have been easing into my new job duties. I have shifted out of a system administrator role and back into a developer role. While I am extremely capable as a system administrator, I'm not one and I do not desire to be one in the long term. However, in my personal opinion, I find it to be extremely important for a system administrator to have the mentality and some of the skills of a programmer in order to be truly effective, but that's another blog entry (gotta space these ideas out).

In my development role, I am primarily using Visual Studio.NET 2008 and more specific than that, writing ASP.NET applications with a VB.NET code-behind. This is a big shift for me in that prior to this, I had done zero ASP.NET development. In terms of web development, I had done some ASP, and some PHP, and the last Visual Studio version I used consistently was 2003 (but mostly Windows forms and console apps).

So it came as a shock to me that in over 5 years of evolution, visually building a web project in Visual Studio.NET is still very primative and not terribly usable. This, despite the fact that VS2008 continues the trend of being more bloated and slower than previous versions. Now, perhaps I'm being too demanding, and you can also argue that I don't truly understand or appreciate the concepts and fundamentals of web design, but I ask you, why can't developing a web app be as simple, if not nearly the same as developing a Windows form application? Why can't I be allowed to simply drag controls onto the screen and place them in an arbitrary location? Why can't I move some stuff around and align the edges of some controls instead of having to finagle with HTML tables until things are "just right" ?

To me, it's nearly a sin that I find the most useful and frequently used edit screen to be the HTML markup screen. But you know something, I almost like it that way.

Being somewhat cynical and jaded (especially from my previous position), I have a very strong distrust for pretty much any tool that offers let me do something and take care of the rest of it "behind the scenes." I don't like "behind the scenes." Behind the scenes is where the wizard sits. It's where the deals go down, the money gets laundered, and where David Copperfield makes his millions.

Visual Studio 2008 has a name for "behind the scenes." It's summed up in the keyword "partial." Partial classes, functions and methods allow a developer to put some code for a given, atomic coding object, in more than one file, at the developer's discretion. While Microsoft states some interesting and potentially "good" uses for this feature, it ultimately contributes to the generation of less maintainable code. Ah, but I digress....

Perhaps I shouldn't complain about the difficulty. Some people claim that classic VB gave us a horde of programmers that should never have been programmers (and I've met some of them). Adding this technical barrier might actually be something of a good tech check to throw out the "riff raff." Maybe there's a group of people, waiting patiently at the door...waiting for the day that Microsoft releases an ASP.NET IDE that truly allows drag and drop, arbitrary positioning and extremely flexible controls. Maybe....