Pro ASP.NET 4 CMS: Advanced Techniques for C# Developers Using the .NET 4 Framework

Alan Harris

Jul 2010 · Apress

About this ebook

I started down the road of building a content management system (CMS) as a direct result of the experiences I had working with another custom CMS in my day-to-day work. A handful of design decisions made at the conception of that system years ago greatly impacted the CMS from a development standpoint; some things worked exceptionally well, some things needed additional love and care to achieve the results we really wanted, and some things were outright broken. As usual, hindsight is 20/20; although the system had carried us for years, the code base was so huge and so intertwined that rewriting it was the only cost-effective solution. Even simple maintenance tasks and feature development were increasingly resource-prohibitive. I set off on a skunkworks project to create the CMS while the remaining developers kept the existing one chugging along. It’s a truly difficult decision to throw away code. A lot of developers worked on the previous CMS over the years, and a completely new system brings with it a unique set of challenges. I wasn’t only throwing the old code away; I was throwing away the applied project experience, the accumulated developer-hours spent working with it, and so on. It’s the shortest path to incurring significant design debt that I can think of, and incur I most certainly did: the CMS was developed from the ground up over the course of approximately a year.

About the author

Alan Harris is a web and application developer living in Arlington, Virginia. He has worked at more than a few organizations using .NET to create enterprise solutions since the glory days of version 1.1, and can still browse to some of the oldest ones. Aside from working at his desk, he spends most of his time studying Krav Maga and writing music.