ASP.NET MVC – If only we had it 10 years ago

I realised that one of the technology or rather a group of the technologies that stops me from applying for some jobs is ASP.NET MVC + the usual JavaScript stack.

So I bought 2 books on the subject and have been playing with the technology for couple of days now. And I must say things have improved A LOT since I’ve been doing Web Development.

Back in 2003 I were working on an Order Management System and my boss being a perfectionist and a great fan of Google, requested that we created an order input form, comprised of 6 tabs without any postbacks to the server (‘coz they are evil)

All we had at our disposal was ASP.NET and JavaScript. But somehow we managed to archive what he wanted. We of course had to use some serious black magic to fetch data asynchronously (remember no AJAX back then) instead we realised we could use hidden Iframes to fetch all the required data. And the application (the order entry form) became extremely nice to use.

The traders would no longer have to remember the exact ticker, as long as they knew the name the app would asynchronously go and fetch corresponding tickers.

Once you selected a ticker, you would be presented with some information about the instrument, settlement date and the fees would automatically default based on the market where the instrument was traded on, if it was a bond it will also calculate yield, time to maturity, for convertible bonds it will show you all the greeks and much more (limits, holiday calender per market, settlement periods, compliance stuff, history of changes etc). Not only that but the could switch to a different tab effortlessly to see the executions and modify them if necessary. I’m not going to go to cover the other 95% of features, but the app was brilliant in terms of usability, only Google could complete.

Of course there were tons of JavaScript code and only the selected few could fully understand it. It was also hard to maintain and the app only supported IE, but that was fine because all the users only had IE installed anyway.

Now, back to me learning ASP.NET MVC, knockout.js, jQuery, Angular.js, HTTP5. If only we had those technologies back then I just can’t emagine what sort of masterpiece we could have created, how much time we would have saved.

I’m sure, that by being young (20 something) and passionate about technologies, to the point where I would work all the weekend from home, just to impress my boss, played a certain role. But most of all we (and by we I mean myself and another development who later joined to help me out) just tried to pushed the boundaries of possible.

And back then, I were, someone you would call an ASP.NET guru.

But times change, and after not doing any Web Development for 8 years I have to start all over again. Nothing is the same, HTML, CSS , JavaScript, ASP.NET.

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