Rad kills
time to read 6 min | 1066 words

I can only agree with Jeffrey on his post RAD kills. . . software post. And I'll top that one with an observation of my own, there is significant investment to learning how to work with RAD tools, with all their twists and quirks.

I would say that there is just no faster way to display a table on a page than by dragging the table to the form and hitting F5. The problem is that the moment you want to do something with it that isn't obvious, you are suddenly out of drag & drop land and into "understand the RAD tool in depth and then figure out how you can put a seam there to make the change you want".

Here is a good example, I got a collection of objects from the database, and the way they are built and the way that they should be displayed to the user is completely different. I have no idea how I would deal with it in the ".Net Approved Way", I dealt with it by defining a Dictionarty that mapped types to translator methods, like this:

translator.Add(typeof(BugStatus),

                delegate(object status)

                {

                  return Localization.GetEnumValue((Enum)stats);

                });

translator.Add(typeof(User),

                delegate(object user)

                {

                  return ((Users)user).Name;

                });

During databind, the objects are changed to the way I need them. I can a reversed function if I want to get an object from its string representation. When I tried to do it using the ASP.Net tools it was so frustrating...

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