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Grid Hell

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So I'm writing a short ASP.NET program. And I've entered Grid Hell.

It started as a very simple idea: write a quick application to do agile planning. I keep running into teams that do planning this way or that, and if I want to help people automate a little bit it would help to have some kind of common platform.

I know what you're thinking -- why do they need an automated tool at all?

I think in a true agile environment -- 5 to 7 developers with a product owner that is all co-located, you don't. But once you stop being co-located, or your team gets on up to 40 people, or the product owner is actually a committee of seven directors -- well cards just don't cut the mustard any more.

But still, it's a very easy problem domain. You got people. You got teams. You got iterations. You got stories. People take stories in an iteration and complete them. End of story.

How difficult could it be?

So in the spirit of RAD, I scoped out the domain model, created a mapping through to a database and a DAL. To sweeten the pie, I downloaded the Telerik toolset. This was going to be as easy and simple as possible -- straight ASP.NET screens with postbacks. Nothing fancy. In and out.

But along day 2 or 3, grid hell set in. Grids in ASP.NET are the must-have tools. You can do anything with grids. But grids, as all we web programmers know, really just end up being a

once you get to the page. So each vendor has this complicated dance of taking a ASP.NET control and turning it into a table and then back into a control on the postback. Everything is fine as long as you stay on the paved road.

The problem is that I rarely stay on the paved road. In fact, I don't know anyone who does. No matter how simple the control is set up, you always want something that is a little different.

When I'm in the groove and jamming, I can make a grid get up and dance around on the page, singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" while it computes your taxes -- all on the client side. But usually it takes a few days of digging through manuals and help forums to get up to speed at that level.

The problem is that this level of knowledge is not permanent. Let a few months pass and I've forgotten a lot of it. That's a good thing -- who wants to waste neurons with the obscure details of Infragistics grid version 2004Q2?

But when I get around to grid programming -- grid hell strikes. I am forced to go through 2-3 days of digging around in order to get the stupid grid to work again. There's no way around it, just grin and bear it.

I use ASP.NET and grids as an example, but the fact is, with the complicated stack we have in modern web programming, it's always going to be some kind of technology hell. I could just have easily gone for straight HTML with a CGI-like back-end serving up JSON. Lovely technology -- and I would be spending my time honking around with the box model, browser compatibility, bandwidth issues, etc.

Every time you go back to a technology you've mastered in the past but haven't used in a while, there's a learning curve. Or perhaps a re-learning curve. Grid hell might not be in your professional life, but I'm willing to be you have something just like it.

1 Comment

custom grid controls are the way to go

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on July 2, 2008 1:47 PM.

Why I Blog (Part 1) was the previous entry in this blog.

Doing the Big "O" is the next entry in this blog.

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