aspnet, dotnet comments edit

I’ve been doing ASP.NET for a while, mostly at my current employer where we make large-scale online banking web sites. During that, what I’ve noticed more and more as new features come out for ASP.NET is that there’s a heavy focus on rapid application development - drag, drop, and ship - and less around the idea of creating a commercial application using ASP.NET. There are a few products like Community Server and DotNetNuke out there, but not many (or not as many as there could be) and I’d wager a lot of it has to do with lack of framework support for that sort of app.

To put what I’m talking about in context, let me first describe at a high level the kind of application I’m working on. Customers might want to have us host the application for them or they might want to host it themselves, so it needs to be something fairly easy to deploy. In a hosted environment, the customers want to be able to change their settings easily, so there’s a sort of “configuration user interface” that has to be put in place. Changes might include not only application settings, but text that appears on the various pages, so localization comes into play. It needs to be easily upgraded, deployed, and managed, so you don’t want a full copy of the application out there for every customer; you want a single copy with different IIS apps pointing at it… but that means the application has to support multi-tenancy (you can’t just stick all your config in web.config because there’s only one, right?). In a custom deployment, the application will be taken by a team, put into the customer’s environment, and programmatically customized, which means it needs to have a lot of extensibility points.

So, with that context, here are the big challenges.

Multi-Tenancy

Everything in the .NET framework assumes there’s only one tenant running on the application. When you ask for a configuration value, the value comes from The One Configuration Source and that’s that. There’s no qualifier in there anywhere to say “I want this configuration value for this specific tenant.” You have to write that. If you want a default value for all tenants on the app and the ability for individual tenants to override the value, you have to write that. Same thing with localization - you can’t say “I want this string for this tenant.” There’s one big bucket of resources and that’s it.

The lack of multi-tenancy support is pervasive and means a lot of work for the development group that wants to have a multi-tenant app. That’s unfortunate, particularly in light of the “Software as a Service” push that was going on just a couple of years back. What ever came of that?

Localization

Where do resources get stored? In compiled assemblies, right? What if I need some text on a page changed at runtime but for security reasons I don’t want to be recompiling assemblies and deploying them on the fly? (Multi-tenancy really hurts here since you can’t have a different set of resource assemblies per tenant.) There’s no out-of-the-box alternative to storing localized resources. You want to store things in SQL Server? You get to write that. Want the out-of-the-box stuff (like the ASP.NET localization expressions) to work with it? You get to write the factories and providers for that, too.

Theming

The whole ASP.NET theming thing is broken. Not “broken” in that it doesn’t work, but “broken” in that there are actually two different ways to theme things - skins and master pages. And they sort of work together, but when you define a single “style” for your pages, you have to manually track that “Style X means Skin Y and Master Page Z.” That’s crap.

Don’t forget each tenant wants their own theme, too.

Configuration

There are a lot of things that you might want to configure in an app. Unfortunately, the place that stuff gets stored by default is in an application configuration file. In the filesystem. You want to give someone an interface to configure things, you either have to create a configuration service that stores things in a database and make your interface (and your app) talk to that proprietary service OR you have to allow your interface to somehow update web.config on the fly. In some cases, you can’t escape web.config - for example, if someone enables/disables a feature that means you need to register/unregister an HttpModule, you can’t do that because you can only register modules through web.config.

Oh, and throw in that multi-tenancy thing, too.

Extensibility

ASP.NET apps basically aren’t extendable at the page level. You can’t “derive and override” markup. If you want to interject your own logic, you have roughly three choices:

  1. Put code blocks inside the markup.
  2. Override the page class and change the markup to inherit from your custom page.
  3. Try to anticipate what people might want to extend and allow plugins through inversion of control, Microsoft Extensibility Framework, or some similar approach.

None of those are terribly great. Options one and two have you changing the ASPX markup, which makes it impossible to track what has been customized on that application instance (and is difficult to manage on a per-tenant basis) and option three quickly leads to YAGNI as you try to make everything infinitely extensible.

This actually has a direct impact on…

Deployment and Upgradeability

So, you put together your web app installer, run the MSI, and it puts a bunch of markup and config in the filesystem and some assemblies in the “bin” folder. Six months later, an implementation team has customized this thing using the “extensibility points” you’ve provided above, and they need to upgrade the base application.

Which markup files did they change? What config settings did they change in web.config? It becomes a tedious task of manually merging markup and config. (This is something that users of Subtext and other blogging engines are familiar with, too.)

Could you track checksums on the markup files and compare whether they’ve changed or not? You could… but you’d have to track every checksum for every file for every version ever released because someone might skip upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2 and go directly from 1.1 to 1.3.

Could you compile the pages? Sure, but that not only affects your extensibility (see above) but still requires those markup placeholder pages.

Pages aren’t the only things out there in the filesystem, though. Don’t forget your skins, master pages, and other markup files. In some cases, you can’t even move the locations.

Things in the filesystem that aren’t binary end up being problematic from a deployment and upgrade standpoint. You can address some of this with a custom VirtualPathProvider that serves things from embedded resources, but there are still some things you can’t hide behind a VPP - web.config, for example, and skins.

Why Isn’t This Stuff Addressed?

There are a lot of challenges with making large scale, multi-tenant applications. The above items aren’t an exhaustive list, but they’re some of the more obvious issues. Why hasn’t this been addressed in the framework? Is the majority case really the IT guy dragging a couple of grids and a DataSource onto a page and publishing the app right from Visual Studio? Or is it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, where the features aren’t there so people don’t make these apps… and because people aren’t making these apps, the features aren’t considered important so they aren’t there?

media, music comments edit

I won’t lie - I’m a sucker for heavily produced electronic dance music. The new Lady GaGa album is in constant rotation at my house. If you’re not into that sort of thing, this post isn’t for you.

If you are, though, I was surfing around and found Mysto & Pizzi - some up and coming music producers. They do the remake of “Somebody’s Watching Me” that you might have heard in the background of a Geico commercial. Anyway, if you’re into this sort of thing, there are some great tracks they’ve made available for free.

And, like I said, free. Can’t beat that.

Slightly off topic, but sort of not - I’ve noticed some of these newer artists (like Lady GaGa and Mysto & Pizzi) going a different direction with how they handle downloads and such. Like, when the Lady GaGa album came out, it was the Amazon MP3 deal of the day for like $5. Mysto & Pizzi aren’t putting crap tracks from some band you’ve never heard of out there, they’re putting out stuff from well-known artists. Free. And you know how often I see stuff for these folks online and hear stuff from my friends? All the time. It gets their music out there, gets the names out there, and gets them fans… who will keep coming back, see concerts, buy the merch, etc. Makes me wonder if they aren’t onto something here.

General Ramblings comments edit

Jenn and I went to Las Vegas for three days this week (Tuesday through Thursday) and had a great stay at the Paris Las Vegas. As usual, we walked our asses off, so bad that I can still feel the pain in my hip sockets. I’m pretty sure I never got fully recovered from the previous trip to Vegas a couple of weeks back for MIX09. The Las Vegas Monorail saved us a lot of wear and tear, but apparently not enough.

We saw the “Criss Angel: Believe” show at the Luxor. Neither of us really knew what to expect, but we came out liking it. It’s probably better described as a “magic show with a story” where the assistants and dancers are all Cirque du Soleil performers. For the folks looking for a Cirque show, it’s really more magic than Cirque. Great dancers, really cool costumes, and some great effects… but definitely more “magic” than “Cirque.” We both liked the show a lot, though I feel a bit like it cost a lot for what you get. It’s the most expensive show Jenn and I have seen down there and I think Ka was probably a better value.

There were really only two things that colored the trip for me.

First, when I stayed at The Venetian for MIX09 (and MIX07), the front desk offered to print my airplane boarding pass for me when I checked out. Both times. No charge. It’s a little thing, but so nice and convenient it definitely makes a difference. The Paris Las Vegas insists you use either their business office or one of the myriad internet kiosks they have around so they can charge you $5. Is $5 a huge amount? No, but then, it’s just two pieces of stupid paper. Do they really need to nickel-and-dime me for $5? It’s the little things like that which make a “good” hotel into a “great” hotel. I talked to the front desk about that and “that’s the policy.” Needless to say, I filed a complaint about that. I’ll update this entry if I hear something back, but I’m not holding my breath.

Second, after we checked out, we wanted to leave our bags at the front desk until our shuttle bus arrived. The conversation around that went something like this:

Travis: Hey, we’d liike to leave our bags here until later when our bus thing comes to get us. Bellhop: [condescending] “Bus thing?” What is a “bus thing?” Travis: The, uh, the shuttle bus. To the airport. Bellhop: Ah. I see. I can help you with that. Let me tag those bags. Travis: OK. Bellhop: [after tagging the bags] Here’s your claim ticket. Around when will you be back to get them? Travis: Well, the shuttle leaves a little after 5:00, so around then. Bellhop: I won’t be here at 5:00 when you come back. Travis: Uh… [thinking: So what? I just need to… OH. He’s asking for a tip. Wow, that’s a little forward.] Right. Um… [thinking: All I have is a $20 bill. I’m not giving this guy $20 to check two carry-on bags.] Can I get some change? Bellhop: I can give you change. Travis: OK, I need change for $20. [hands the bellhop the $20 bill] Bellhop: [hands me two $5 bills and stops] How much did you need? Travis: [thinking: What? You seriously think I’m giving you $10 to hold two stupid carry-on bags? Seriously?] Um, $18. [thinking: $2 is way more than enough for you, asshole, considering I’m going to also have to tip the guy I pick this up from.] Bellhop: [glaring at me] $18? Travis: [thinking: You know what, shithead? Why not give me all $20 back and take a different tip - don’t be an asshole. I don’t owe you shit. You’re a fucking bellhop. You get paid to take my God damn bags. Take them and shut the fuck up.] Yes, $18. [taking the last $8] Thanks.

Now, I know it’s a tip-oriented culture down there, but this guy was pretty demanding and blunt about the whole thing.

I filed a complaint about that, too.

Other than that, our stay was great. The room was great, the rest of the service was great, the food was great… Hopefully the Paris won’t turn into a low-end nickel-and-dime you sort of establishment. I’ve loved my stays before, and aside from these two issues it was another good stay.