Progress is, by definition, a positive thing. But isn't it frustrating when you then have to go back and work on something older again. Then you realise just how far you've come.
I've recently been working on a site developed in .NET 2.0 - we've come all the way now to 3.5 (which in fact is deceptively only actually one version up) but the differences in some tasks are incredible.
I set out to create an entirely custom paging User Control for a .NET 2.0 datagrid - seemed like a simple idea at the time - but the datagrid in question was a pretty complex one, and the ASP.NET Page Cycle threw in a few curve balls! And I wanted a control that could be applied to any datagrid. This proved to be a great deal more difficult than I expected. Perhaps my expectations were biased by the ease of achieving this with the new ASP 3.5 ListView (as previously hyped up by me). It ended up taking a good four-five hours. The good news is, it is now, rock solid, is totally reusable and can be applied to every scenario that I can imagine.
Next time, hopefully the client in question will have access to .NET 3.5 though!
Labels: asp.net, ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 3.5, Custom User Control, DataView, ListView, Page Cycle