*rant* - Microsoft, why do you do this to me?

(Recent discussions of the Windows platform have led me to disclose my opinion of a particular infelicity of ASP.Net)

Background: a few years ago, my day job consisted primarily of web development using ASP.Net v.2 and C#. Overall I quite enjoyed the experience. C# is IMHO a pretty decent language, and .NET is alright too. Everything works perfectly smoothly, until you travel off the beaten path.

If Perl's maxim is "There's more than one way to do it," then ASP.Net's is "There's more than one way to do it, but the likelihood of any given way working properly is inversely proportional to the number of ways to do it."

I had an interface, let's call it IHasData. This interface provided a function to pretty-print information associated with different types of events for a web calendar. So far so good. I wanted to display several different events in a GridView. "Simple," I said to myself, "just put them in a generic collection and assign the data source." So I did that, with code pretty much like this (apologies if the syntax is off; I haven't done C# for years):

GridView gv = new GridView();
ListSet events = new ListSet();

//code to fill the events set omitted.

gv.DataSource = events;

and everything should work like a charm. Except, now my page sometimes threw an exception.

It was an odd exception too, indicating that some particular IHasData instance didn't have an unrelated method (i.e. not exposed by IHasData) that wasn't supposed to be in that class anyway. My code was only using IHasData methods; the types ensured that nothing else could be accessed. So why was .Net trying to load something unrelated?

The actual problem was pretty clear. .Net was using reflection on the first element of the data source, and assuming that all remaining elements would have exactly the same type. .Net's reflection facilities are quite powerful, and once they're in play all members of a class are available, regardless of the type used to access it. Not necessarily a good idea for a generic list on interfaces. I have no idea why the GridView has this behavior, but it makes me sad. Particularly since it could have been done right and been that much more useful.

Ultimately this was only one of a host of problems that stemmed from trying to use NHibernate, persistent objects, and .Net built-in features like the ObjectDataSource. It would have been really slick if it worked as advertised, but there were some significant design flaws and the implementation was half-baked at best. I did eventually create a framework that filled most of the gaps, but I was making up for functionality the framework was supposed to provide and didn't. Not good.