buttons…

So I’m constantly asked, “How can you sit at a computer programming all day?” and alot of times people just don’t understand how fun it is. I believe, more often than not, that they think it’s just the same thing day in and day out. Well sometimes sure it can get to that, especially on a long running project, but it also seems to me that if that’s the case it’s not really a project you want to be on. The best projects, at least for me, are usually the ones that start out with something I know how to do, or at least have used enough to feel comfortable with.

I will use the current project I’m working on right now to illustrate what I am talking about. Currently we are writing custom web parts for a Sharepoint Portal for a training center. So what did I know about this going into it? Well I had used Sharepoint from a user’s standpoint so I understood that side of it, but I had never really heard of web parts or anything like that. That’s easily rectified with a quick google search. Ahhh, it’s kind of like gadgets on start.com. Still confused, basically it’s a small little part on the web page that performs a specific task I guess would be the best way to put it. Ok, I also know ASP.NET and that seems the obvious thing to use within Sharepoint since it is a Microsoft product. Hrmm, a little more googling and you find out that it’s not necessarily that easy to write them yourself by hand (read that as: there is no visual developer for them yet) which I don’t particularly like the visual editor in asp.net, but you take that away and you also take away the html editor which is VERY useful.

Ok, well I don’t want to just do this all by hand, that does not seem productive, so is there a way to make this web part just load an asp.net user control? Sure there is, there’s plenty of things out there about it, but what about SmartPart? Well what about it, oh, you just tell it what user control to load and it just loads it for you? That’s fantastic. A few minor customizations later and you are developing web parts like a champion.

Well this is getting old, but here’s this reporting section needed so time to go learn something else new…

That’s the way things should work in my opinion, start with something you’ve learned and continue to build upon it, then take a small branch off to the side and pick up something new to tie into it. Most improtant thing beyond that is to document your code so you remember why you did something a certain way, and then of course store copies away so you can refer back to it and build upon it.