Delegates, Components, and Simplexity, great quote:

“.. There’s one kind of simplicity that I like to call simplexity. When you take something incredibly complex and try to wrap it in something simpler, you often just shroud the complexity. You don’t actually design a truly simple system. And in some ways you make it even more complex, because now the user has to understand what was omitted that they might sometimes need. That’s simplexity. So to me, simplicity has to be true, in the sense that the further down you go the simpler it gets. It shouldn’t get more complicated as you delve down.“

ASP.NET has a feature called tracing, which according to the ASP.NET Trace documentation “… allows you to view diagnostic information about a single request for an ASP.NET page simply by enabling it for your page or application.” If you’ve used ColdFusion before, you’re probably yawning, “.. we’ve had debugging since version 3.0..”, but wait, it gets cooler. You can also view the information from a page (Trace.axd) called the “trace viewer”, which allows you to view detailed information the last N requests (read: requests that other people have made to your site), which would/could be extremely helpful during any phase of development, including production. Unlike ColdFusion, you configure this per application in the web.config file:

<trace
   enabled=”true”
 traceMode=”SortByCategory”
 requestLimit=”40″
 pageOutput=”false”
 localOnly=”false”
/>

Anyone know if there is a tool like this for servlet containers? Or if certain servlet containers support something like this?

I mentioned a couple days ago that my current project is based on a C# and ASP.NET. I don’t have access to Visual Studio (should I try to get it? is it worth it?) so I’ve been using the Improv C# plugin with Eclipse. The combination works alright, but there are a couple things that need improvement. First, when compiling an assembly in C#, you have to specify each module that it references per class, there isn’t a way to to say that MyProject.dll should be included in the classpath for the entire C# project. Second, there’s no way to say that you want all the compiled assemblies to be placed in ../classes/ instead of ../build (ie: you can’t specify an output folder). But that’s where NAnt comes to the rescue. I downloaded NAnt today and was able to get a build script running within a couple minutes that accomplishes the two things I needed above.

I do have a question for those of you who have done .NET programming before. In Java, you compile .java files to .class files. Using C#, you compile a .cs file to a .dll (or .exe, etc..) which is called an assembly. Then in Java you’d usually package up your class files into a jar file. After using NAnt today, I see that you can compile a bunch of .cs files into a single dll, also called an assembly, which you can then use just like a jar file. Do I have that right? Are there different ways of doing this?