One of my 2 readers, Steve Morse, asked a question about my post about the back button.

"A common pattern is "post backs" to the same page as a user interacts with the page. For example, the page displays a list with details of a selected item below. When a user clicks a list item it posts back, and the page now displays the details below. This is standard .ASPX with "view state". Are you saying there is something wrong with this technique?"

My other reader, Dave Sweeny, asked me to explain a bit more.

Being happy I have readers, I’ll try to take it down a level.

Steve, I think your scenario is this

1. Page displays a list, with the content area of the page empty
2. User clicks item in ...

Most of my projects over the last several years have included an interactive website component, one designed primarily to capture information from the user.  My topic today is about how these websites deal with the browser controls such as the dreaded Back, Forward, Refresh, and Bookmark.

I’ve never encountered a deeper “religious” reaction from engineers (including myself) than on this issue.  Many issues reach this level, but none have exceeded it.

Another characteristic of this issue is that it is often dismissed by the business users as minutia.  The issue is a bit complex to understand, but I believe the real reason business dismiss it is because they are not driven to fully confront the related questions until it is too late to do something about it.

So what’s the problem?

Technically speaking, the issue’s core ...

First, me
I consider myself to be an application development generalist.  This is true in several dimensions:
1. The technologies I work with
2. The roles I play
3. The industries I have experience in
4. The approaches I use to solve a problem
I stress this point first to make it clear that I am not a specialist – barring that I specialize in being a generalist.  Although I have deep knowledge in many areas, and can hold my own in nearly any technical conversation – my knowledge is sometimes not as deep as some of the great experts in any single field.

Next, my point
I’m starting this blog to record and communicate my position on various topics I find interesting.  The first topics I have in mind are about situations and disagreements from my professional experience.  Some of these situation ...

I've been thinking about some fundamental differences between WF and a few 3rd party workflow tools (Metastorm, Bluespring Software and others). In WF, describing a workflow process is conceptually similar to designing a Windows form.  Utilizing the Visual Studio design time capabilities of activity classes we can configure our model. Code-behind implements the configuration and is eventually compiled into a "runnable" workflow. The 3rd party tools I've worked with provide a more explicit seperation of the process description metadata and the workflow engine runtime. Generally a process description tool allows the process to be modelled and published to a persistant store. At runtime, the workflow engine utilizes this metadata to execute an instance of a workflow.

Initially the WF approach seemed flawed. I instictively felt it was Microsoft's bias that everything should be source code and modelled in Visual Studio. But the more I've thought about it the more I l ...

Welcome to my first blog. My intent is to inject some technical ideas and experiences into the general "noise" of technical blogs that permeate the internet. For now I'll assume I'm the only reader (or at the most my Stong Point partners). Currently I've been looking at Windows Workflow and trying to figure out what it is and what it does. I've concluded MSDN is not the place to start. After logging a number of hours browsing MSDN, I realized I'm either getting too old to learn something new or the MSDN topics are an after thought. I purchased a book from Amazon and am relieved that WF is understandable. The book is titled "Windows Workflow Foundation" by K. Scott Allen. It provides a concise and logical discussion of WF and it's application to some basic problems. At this point I expect many of my fut ...