Technical Fixation

Ever noticed that when some coders learn a new technique they apply it like slathering butter on bread even where it makes no sense?

I'm re-engineering a web page where there is a parent-child relationship between two entities akin to a user and what rights they might have. The original coder used two listboxes to show assigned and available rights (good!) but then used checkboxes in each listbox row with a check all box in the header (the newly learned technique). To move rights around you check your butt off and then hit Save changes.

What the hell? I'm replacing it with the traditional mover lists construct while enabling multiple selections in each list. A lot fewer mouse clicks when moving shit around and conforms to a better understood standard, IMHO.

To paraphrase an old saying, if builders built buildings the way some web designers code web pages the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

I go back to what I keep preaching: Experienced Fox coders should run absolute rings around pure .Net weenies if they put up the intellectual investment to learn the syntax and idiosyncrasies of .Net. MS has had problems with migrating VB 6 coders to VB .Net and adoption of VB .Net has been slow. Wanna know why, IMHO? Because most VB coders couldn't architect their way out of a bird fountain. Experienced VFPers understand the interconnection between all aspects of the application and think long and hard about the architecture, meaning UI and classlibs, before writing a line of code.

You all could be rockstars. My sole regret is that it took this long for me to get this deeply involved with .Net not to see it.