Crazy Talk: Inline Scripting Revisited (Or, 2003 Bites Back)

Tuesday, February 05, 2008 -

A few months back, right before I was hired by Microsoft, I knew people wouldn't look kindly on the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework and it's support of Inline Scripting. As part of my community effort I decided to take this issue on a bit and try to remind people that inline scripting on it's own isn't spaghetti code - it's the code itself.

As I always say - spaghetti is as spaghetti does.

Last night I had a fun (not really) experience, and for me it's thrown a whole new twist on what Inline Scripting and Maintainability mean. Code Generation and an old toolset don't add up to a fun maintenance issue...

Knock Knock Rob, it's 2003 Calling
I worked on a pretty nice site back in 2003 when I was in love with CodeSmith and Extreme Code Generation. I had this Killer Set of Templates that I could rock out a full-blown scaffold with (before it became a household control in .NET), and I used them to create the admin section of said site.

I won't dive into the details, suffice to say it works and I'm not very happy with why. It was an admin site and I reasoned that I didn't need to worry about perf (which is true). The code was readable, easy to follow, and while I could have/should have refactored it to be less verbose, I liked that I could rev the DB and then generate the code - this process was simple and timely.

Ahem. Yes I know.

The site has worked great for the last 4 years, until today. Strange how these bugs can lie dormant for so long! I'd never had this happen before and the bug was pretty stupid.

In short, the site is for a Venture Capital company and the DB holds all kinds of "people info" - teams, groups, etc. The groups haven't changed at all over the last 4 years - until 3 days ago.

The admin for the site decided to add a group for a company they acquired, and when she went to the admin tool it exploded - complaining that the Data Table I was using wasn't mapped properly. The templates I created used the built-in DataTable.Update() support so I could work with any DB Provider - unfortunately if they don't map to your scheme precisely, you'll have a bug on your hands.

Oops. I changed the schema back in 2004 and forgot to regenerate my Code Page it seems. Bad Dev.

And The Feeling Of Dread Creeps Over...
The admin person was very nice - sending me an email that I take a look at the problem. That night, when I got home I fired up VS, grabbed the source from my Subversion server, and set about fixing the issue.

It's .NET 1.1. Uh Oh. Forgot about that...

I don't have VS 1999 (or whatever version that was) anymore and I don't know where that CD could be. Crap - I knew I should have held onto that! Frantically I think of all the PCs in the house (laptop, old box in the garage) and where/how I can install 1.1 so I can work on this site.

As I start to weigh the time up (finding and installing 1.1, getting the site setup, and redeploying) I start to think sideways (it's how my brain works) and I realize:

I only need Visual Studio so I can compile the dang solution - I know how to run "csc"... I can do this without it!

But I don't have .NET 1.1! It's easy to get - but now I have to install it and reboot and if I get errors this is going to take me a very, very long time tonight and I want to watch Lost! This is getting out of control...

I think about converting the whole thing to .NET 2.0, but this is a no-go as the hosting account is set to 1.1 and I don't want to deal with that. So I restate the problem to myself - this helps me from doing stupid stuff to solve a minor issue:

You simply need to add one line of code to account for the DB schema change.

There's no way I'm sitting here partying with VS 1999 and .NET 1.1 so I can accomplish a single line of code change. That, my friends, is a maintenance issue (and yes, it's my fault).

Sir, The Wall's Too Tall! No Problem, We'll Go Through It!
As I restate the problem to myself, it becomes clear that the only thing in my way here is the mechanism itself: fix the code and recompile. The only reason I'm installing these tools is to recompile - so let's remove that step from the equation so I can now fix the problem.

I moved all the code from the codebehind page, pasted it between <script runat="server"> tags, and then reset the @Page directive to not inheret anything. Took me 5 minutes: I made the fix, and FTP'd it up. Done.

It reminded me of my last post on the inline/codebehind debate, and one of the comments I received:

"I think inline script blows...No thanks. I think it's a very bad idea. Cleaner and more manageable? You must have been drunk when you posted this."

It may indeed blow, but it just saved my bacon :).

Summary and The Obligatory Hedge
I know this isn't an issue with ASP.NET 2.0, and yes I know that I should have been a LOT more careful with my Code Generation. But as I've been writing this I've been chuckling at the things I did back then (don't we all?). I loved Code Generation - to me it saved so much time, and I could be pretty certain that bugs were mitigated since I didn't handcode the stuff. I just had to remember to do it!

I'm not telling you to use Inline Scripting - I just found this to be very, very ironic since many people believe your application is "less maintainable" if you use it. Not in this case my friends :).

I spose the moral of the story is to always view the concept of maintenance with an eye towards shifting toolsets and platforms. In 4 years you will need to support the ASP.NET 2.0 site you're on now, using Visual Studio 2012 and it's Silverlight-generated Scaffolds :).

You may not want to go running through the house looking for VS 2005 and hopefully you won't have to since 2008 supports 2005 projects - but will VS 2012? Notice that 2005/2008 doesn't support 1.1...

And finally, while you may be thinking I'm a complete hack :), think back to what you did in 2003...