Spent last week working on several projects. Had to do several weeks of work in one week. Quite a stress test on me and VS (2003). We all more or less survived. Some reflections :
- I need a portal. Integrating several web apps by hand makes you feel like reinventing a wheel allready rolling.
- I need an O-R mapper or other tool to take one step away from the underlying databases. SqlDataAdapters and Components are great but you end up with a monster application. Thank goodness it's a gentle whale, enormous but with friendly behaviour.
- Crystal Reports look nice but the report designer integrated in VS can be annoying. You cannot move a subreport from one section to the other, you have to recreate the whole subreport... And sometimes clicking something blows away VS. Without warning.
- VS.NET is really nice. Best feature I discovered is moving a webform from one application to the other. Which is a matter of drag and drop in the solution explorer. In the code you only have to update the namespace by hand.
- Trying to install multiple web-applications from one msi can be good way to make Windows installer produce very erratic messages.
Now it's time to read some blogs.
Peter