Mike Hodnick

I haven't posted in a while because things have been pretty busy in the office. I haven't had much time at all to continue my WPF research, but there are some other interesting things happening that I hope to write about in the near future.

VS .Net Solution Re-structuring - My development team that works on .Net apps for one of our clients is looking into restructuring the primary Visual Studio .Net solution that holds most of the app code. The way it is currently structured makes it difficult to develop, maintain, and deploy the applications. There are 24 projects in the solution, including web applications and shared assemblies. A new strategy for versioning and deployment is also in the works.

Not-so-shared web controls - I now have ownership of a common web controls project that is a part of the bigger solution named above. It was developed using web user controls but is being deployed for use by multiple web applications. Some trickery with virtual directories is used in an attempt to try and make these web controls "shared", but because of how ASP .Net caches assemblies, it causes many problems during deployment over the different web applications. Ideally I'd like to convert this project into a custom web server control library so that they can be truly shared, but there are over 75 web user controls that would need to be converted. I'm not sure if it will make sense to literally convert everything to custom web server controls, but what we're doing now doesn't work so well either.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be to justify the time needed to work on these issues. Arguably, fixing these issues will result in much higher development productivity and smoother deployments in the future. Short term, the gains may not be noticeable - and will likely slow down any immediate development. Building up the case to work on these issues shouldn't be too difficult, but it will be necessary in order to justify working on them.