I just got in from attending a local MSDN event. Part of the “Microsoft Across America” series. I came through the door of my house with a new shrink wrapped T-shirt, a dvd with the latest August/September 2004 MSDN stuff, and a slight look of bewilderment on my face.
The August/September topics were 1) Building Custom Controls with ASP.Net, 2) ASP.Net 2.0 Overview and 3) InfoPath with VS.Net. My purpose for going, besides trying to support local MSDN events in my area, was to learn, see and hear more about ASP.Net 2.0. As excited as I am about ASP.Net 2.0 (and all of .Net 2.0 for that matter), I have to admit that I have not even loaded a pre-beta or beta of 2.0 yet, or even opened somebody else’s 2.0 IDE yet. I’m involved with a fairly large .Net 1.1 project that has kept me pretty busy lately. I just don’t have a free machine that I’m either developing or debugging some piece of code that is related to this project in some way or another, and I can’t afford to take the chance or time to cause an unstable situation. So, to compensate I’ve tried to keep up on as much blog, forum, discussions, etc. related to 2.0.
So, as excited, as I was to learn a little more about Asp.Net 2.0, I left the discussion with a look of bewilderment. The reason was the following statement, which was made in the opening comments by the presenter: “…all without writing a single line of code.”
Why is writing code such a bad thing? Why does this continue to be such a holy grail at MSDN events? Here I am, in a room full of developers, at an event that is supposed to be for developers, and once again our goal is not to write a single line of code. Call me old fashioned, call me a dinosaur, but I LIKE TO WRITE CODE. It is what I do for a living, I like to think that I’m pretty good at it, and I like to think that there is value in the code I’m involved with writing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the continued effort to reduce the amount of plumbing and repetitive code that needs to be written. I’m all for drag and drop GUI designers, and automated ways of doing things. And it does looks like we get a lot of new automatic code writing, templates, and even completely integrated web security and configuration management modules all by the click of a button. All really cool stuff.
But, why can’t we write a single line of code. Why can’t we see first hand some of new namespaces and classes. Our presenter, after being persuaded finally opened the code behind (oops, code-beside/partial class, our slides still said code-behind). However, commented that he had absolutely no reason to write any code there. There was nothing he could think of that he would want to do here that he couldn’t do in the designer?
I’m not going to comment on the event location or presenter, because I don’t think it was an isolated thing. I have been hearing the “… all without a line of code” thing for sometime now. I remember the first time I saw a demonstration that involved some dragging of a table onto a designer and finally having rad at my finger tips. I think this was around the vb5 rdo to ado transition period. Ok, it has come a long way since then, and now we are even doing this on web pages. But, from the voice of one developer out there “MSDN - I also want to see some code, it is important to me as a developer.”