Re: SQL Server Express: Anybody Using It?

"Rick Brandt" <rickbrandt2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:sUZKf.15551$2O6.685@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Lyle Fairfield wrote:
With Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (free) I dragged
an MS-SQL View onto a aspx page and voila ... it's there as a
datagrid, like a continuous form, paged, sortable ...each row
select-able, editable, delete-able ... time required ... about 5
seconds ... alternate line formatting? ... another few seconds.

With any version of access I can link to a SQL Server view and
just like that I've got a datagrid that I can page, scroll, sort,
edit, each row selectable. Time required maybe 30 seconds. Do I
have an application?

Grids are cheap and easy. Almost no one would expose an Access
datasheet to a user and call it an "application", but make a grid
appear in a web browser and now it's a piece of magic.

Yes, grids are relatively trivial. I could knock out PHP code to do
the same thing in about 2 minutes, myself, with no drag and drop. It
wouldn't be beautiful, but it would display the contents of a data
table in tabular form.

Now give your user CheckBoxes for Yes/No fields, drop downs that
show one thing while storing another. Master/Detail interfaces or
the equivalent functionality of an OptionGroup frame. If these
can be accomplished in a few minutes time with VS/Dot-Net then I
must admit that I simply could not see it. Perhaps Visual Web
Developer is quite different from full-blown Visual Studio.

Well, it's possible now with AJAX to develop much richer client-side
user interfaces for use in a browser. But those are created by
extending the standard HTML form widgets with JavaScript extensions
and event handlers. My bet is that if the tools Lyle is raving about
are implementing these features, they are *not* doing it in a
cross-browser compliant way. Look at the Exchange Server 2003
Outlook Web Access feature -- it uses AJAX techniques, but in a way
that works completely differently on IE than in other browsers. The
full-featured UI is available only with IE.

Tying your app to such a poor browser is a big mistake, in my
opinion, and you're also tying yourself (with ASP.NET) to Microsoft
server products and Windows-based hosting, which is generally more
expensive and less common than Apache/Linux-based hosting.

I'm learning ... and fooled around for the better part of a day
with styles, appearance, authentication and insert.

I do the same thing in my Ajax development. What would take a few
minutes in Access takes hours in a web environment and that
doesn't even take into account trying to make sure that the page
works and looks correct in anything besides Internet Explorer.

Anyone with any sense starts writing their HTML/CSS/AJAX for Firefox
and then figures out what doesn't work right in IE and patches that
(IE has tons of terribly CSS incompatibilities, which MS has failed
to promise to fix in IE7).

When I got those passable, I created a similar page for another
view ... time about 2 minutes; I simply changed my SQL string and
my field names and headers headers and my parameters.

Tomorrow (maybe!) I'm going to experiment (or i'm going to watch
the Canadian Curling Teams at the Olympics) with ListBoxes ...
Totals ... conditional formats like red for negatives ... other
gnarly things ... I expect I'll be baffled by some ... but once I
solve them I'll be ... well I think I MAY be ... much faster than
developing in Access ... and I've been developing in Access for a
long, long time ... I think 1991 but I'm not sure Access was
around in 1991.

You'll likely have a ball and learn a lot of new stuff (who
doesn't like that?), but I doubt that you will ever approach the
development speed that you could with Access.

Because browser-based apps are stateless, they require more screens
than Access does to accomplish the same tasks. And the widgets, even
with AJAX, are never going to be as rich as those available even in
Access 2.

Our company is switching all new development from
Access/Delphi/RPG to Web apps using Ajax methods. I find it
incredibly interesting and haven't been this enthused about coming
to work in ages. Will any of my users benefit from this change?
I extremely doubt it. Stuff I used to give them in minutes now go
into the queue and when I get to them it will likely take a day or
two for the easy stuff and a week or two for the more complicated
stuff.

One of the things that's happening, though, is that the people who
do web development *do* find .NET to be very helpful, since it's far
more productive than the old methods, because the development
environment is so good (I hear). They are seeing large improvements
in productivity.

But they've never experienced Access-style RAD development, so they
don't realize how incredibly far they are from true quick
development of apps with a rich UI.

Now, if I were independent and my wages depended on getting the
job done as quickly as possible so I can move onto the next one I
most certainly would use Access unless there was something
(technical or political) that forced me to do otherwise.

I don't understand why people think web-oriented development
techniques can possibly replace the speed and richness of a desktop
application's UI, with native OS widgets and bound data (rather than
being stateless).

And, as Larry said, many apps don't belong on the Web, so you're
actually crippling their functionality and making them harder to use
by converting them to be hosted in a web browser. As you say, this
is a very user-hostile thing to do, and I don't understand why
people think it's a good idea.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.

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