Fair warning, this post is going to be a bit of a rant about ASP.Net and how it does nothing like every other web language on the planet.
So far today i've spent about six hours trying to come up with a solution to one of those problems that seems like it should be oh so simple to solve. As of this point, I got nothin'.
So the client I'm at these past couple months uses a third party set of ASP.Net user controls to handle a lot of AJAX tricks and visual prettiness. The only problem is from what I can tell they don't work. They don't render correctly in Firefox, occasionally don't render correctly in IE and cause some serious issues when paired with jQuery. The problem i was tasked to solve was a scenario where when using this third party controlset's popup box (essentially a floating DIV) it could cause the rest of the content on the page to fall down and be essentially invisible. To make matters worse the popup itself showed up below the fold, the scroll bar was disabled and it was modal, so there's no way to get back to a usable state short of refreshing the browser. After a couple hours playing with the control I decided it would be easier to pull the control out completely and go to the quite excellent jQuery UI dialog plugin. Once I applied it to the mischievous popup the UI worked and all was well... or so i thought.
A day passed and our tech lead came over. He asked if I could convert the rest of the popups in the application to jQuery for consistency and so that the issue wouldn't reoccur in the future, so I started doing that. Things were going well until I ran into another of this toolkits controls, CallbackPanel. For all intents and purposes CallbackPanel is like an update panel except it is invoked directly in javascript. I started applying the jQuery work to a popup containing one of these panels and noticed an odd trend. It behaved correctly when executed the first time, but when run again without a page refresh the javascript would execute but the server side code was never called. As of yet I have been unable to resolve this and have a pending support ticket with the vendor. My theory is the event is somehow tied to where in the DOM the panel original resides. When i put that panel in a jQuery dialog it is updated in the DOM and that breaks the event.
Since i have little faith in the vendor's speed to fix this (or tell me its intended functionality) I opted to move ahead and try and migrate the whole section into a simple AJAX call back. I would make a call to a WebMethod and return some markup from the user control that would then be injected into the popup and voila.. ajaxy goodness. This is how i would approach this on just about any other platform. Alas, .NET is not any other platform.
The first issue i run into is that WebMethods have to be static. That means I cant access the usercontrol already on the page.
Ok no problem, I'll instantiate one and get the rendered HTML, pass that back to the client.
Try instantiating the class, no go. Turns out you need to use LoadControl (a non-static method of course) to create an instance of a user control otherwise all the child controls don't get instantiated.
Crap, ok Mr. John Miller find this article for me. I create a page object, load the control, use reflection to set various properties and even isolate all this into a class called UserControlRenderer for reuse. Things are looking good until I run it.
Error executing child request for handler ‘System.Web.UI.Page
Son of a bitch are you kidding me? Do a bit of digging and find out that you cant render a DataGrid (or GridView) unless it is contained in a form with runat=server set. Which means this approach of rendering just the user control to a string and returning it won't work for my implementation because I'm using one of the most common controls in .Net.
All told I have about 45 lines of code to do nothing but try and render the control (Set up, instantiation, the class that does the rendering, etc) and I have to tap into reflection to do it. Oh and it doesn't even work.
For those of you that haven't played with any languages outside of .Net here's how much code I would need in say Ruby to render a single "user control" (they are called partials in rails)
render :partial=>"mycontrol", :layout=>false
One line... one line of code. And it works.Of course I have to get the data and set it to a variable accessable to the control, then render out the html... but I have to do all that in .Net too and I didnt count those lines in my 45 above.
From day one the ASP.Net team assumed that their target audience was a group of people who didn't understand the web. Didn't get the general stateless nature, or how HTML works. That probably made a ton of sense in 2001 when .Net was young, people were used to writing VB windows apps and there was a push to migrate those application to the web. It 2010 it makes no sense. If you are web developer and don't understand how the web works I dare say you are a quite incompetent web developer. Thank god for the push to ASP.Net MVC, here's hoping it takes over in enterprise soon.
Ok rant done. Next post will be a bit more productive.
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