For the past six months or so, I’ve been working on a really cool website in ASP.NET
2.0. As soon as the last bugs and design tweaks have been dealt with, we are releasing
it to the world – we’re almost there.
Yesterday, the webmaster wanted to do some changes to the website himself. He knows
a little HTML and has managed sites before - including the old version of the site
we’re building. So, I gave him the FTP login information and he connected from Dreamweaver
as he is used to. However, Dreamweaver do not understand ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages
and screwed everything up.
He knows Dreamweaver and feels comfortable using it, but he had to make the switch
to Visual Web Developer Express (VWDE)
in order to make it work and that didn’t please him. We finally connected using VWDE
and all works fine. Or at least we thought it did…
A new problem that I hadn’t foreseen presented itself in the form of the complexity
of the .aspx, .ascx and .cs files. For a person used to manage old ASP pages this
turned out to be a nightmare. That’s because with the old ASP it was fairly easy to
manage the different #include files and find the text you want to change, but in ASP.NET, the text could be located at various different location including in the C#/VB.NET
code from another assembly or an embedded resource file.
I would imagine that this issue is shared throughout the community, but it was my
first encounter with it.
Back in the days when ASP.NET 1.0 was released, Microsoft said that it was now possible
for developers and designers to work together on the same project, because of the
separation of HTML and the code-behind. In the light of the above mentioned issue, I do not see how this is possible unless the designer/webmaster knows his way around
assemblies, resource files and C#/VB.NET, which then would make him a developer and
not a webmaster.
Also, the webmaster uses the VWDE designer and that is something I NEVER do, so I
didn’t make an effort to make design time databinding and stuff like that, which makes
the page look miserable in the designer.
It is easier to manage an ASP website for non-developers and that’s such a shame for, let’s be honest, it sucked.
The more you separate code to user- and server controls the more difficult it becomes
to manage it. So, the next question would naturally be: If the website is to be managed
by a non-developer, should you avoid the separation?
A solution could be to change the password for the FTP site, so the webmaster won’t
get access, but that will only lead to extra work for myself, so that doesn’t count
as a solution.
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