Survey Generator - an vb .net application that automates survey creating process
This week, I had to put aside my chicago-resource-google-mapping project aside, because I spent nearly all my time attacking a VB .NET application, a survey generator. Because my one-woman web team has to deal with more and more web survey requests, I finally decided to write an application to kill all surveys with one or two buttons clicks. I am almost done. In doing the application, I discovered (or merely confirmed) two convenient "truths' (probably only truth to me).
1) ASP is the way to go to deal with surveys, where there consists of a school of client interactions. Although ASP .NET has taken many steps to remedy its weakness in handling client-side tasks, it still lacks the flexibility of classic asp. To me it is convoluted that you have to call some class named clientscript and then register it to perform some client tasks like hide and show a layer.
2) Strongly typed dataset is a joy to use, kind of, if you have the aid of intellisense. However, code wise, it is sort of verbose, even though when accessing data members, you can directly access a field by its name. So instead of:
string s= (string) myDataSet.Tables["Customers"].Rows[0]["CustomerID"];
you can just code:
string s = myDataSet.Customers[0].CustomerID
However, the flip side of rigor is inflexibility