Acceptance of ASP.NET 2.0 Will Take Time

No, no, I’m not going to be Johnny Rain Cloud exposing some dirty little secrets of The Big 2.0. Back in June Scott Mitchell expressed how he felt about being no longer cutting edge with the advance of everything 2.0. If you feel the same way, welcome to the club—you’re in good company. I don’t feel intimidated by 2.0. I feel perplexed, much like Scott.

In my opinion, the best explanation of how change in technology is accepted is found in Peopleware, a book by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. They dedicated a chapter of their book to the subject of change and its acceptance phases. What follows below is an excerpt from the book.

“When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is Chaos. You’ve been there before. It’s when you are convinced that you are worse off than before with this new tool, new procedure, or new technique. […] You are suffering from the dip in the learning curve, and the assessment that the change is the problem may well be right, at least for the moment. You are worse off, for now. This is part of the reason why response to change is so emotional. It is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. Nobody enjoys that sense of floundering; you just know you would be better off with the old way. Unfortunately, this passage through Chaos is absolutely necessary, and it can’t be shortcut. […]

“The [intermediate] phase occurs on the upswing of the learning curve. You are not yet completely comfortable, as you are not yet proficient at the new, but you perceive that the new is now beginning to pay off or at least to show promise.

“You have reached the New Status Quo when what you changed to becomes what you do. An interesting characteristic of human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the perceived value of the New Status Quo—if you can get there.”

Conclusion

It will be interesting to see how projects across organizations cut over from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0. There’s always this inherent resistance to such a massive change coupled with frustration and a humiliating feeling that you are a novice once again. There will definitely be a learning curve, and you just gotta slug through it knowing that others are going through the same experience and reach that “New Status Quo.”

It seems like everyone I know has an adverse first reaction to ASP.NET 2.0. The fact that the migration from 1.x to 2.0 is non-trivial only makes the curve steeper.

Actually, I find the opposite. I look forward to 2.0. I disliked 1.x so much because its quality of HTML output was extremely poor, non-semantic, and most crucially, often inaccessible.

In the end, we typically by-passed the .NET controls and used XML/XSL to fully control what we wanted to output (while using the power of OO and .NET on the server side).

With 2.0 beta that I have seen so far, there looks to be a good set of changes in this area...

I'm already actively using 2.0 and VS2005 for a major rewrite of one of the apps I've built. I'm only using 1.1 and VS2003 for supporting existing apps, all new work will be done in 2.0

I'm with Anup. I've been waiting so long for master pages and personalization that I can't wait for 2.0 to release. Any pain in the learning curve will be outweighed by the benefits.

Actually, the biggest issue won't be in migrating our (very huge) ASP.NET Insurance application (I'm responsible for the accounting subsystem) to 2.0. It'll still be very much 1.x ASP.NET. Taking advantage of the new features that makes 2.0 and .NET 2.0 what they are, will require quite a bit of work. I don't know how most people do their pages, but I know how all the various teams did these, and each team has a different "flavor" to the approach.

Migrating to the 2.0 platform is the easy part. Taking advantage of 2.0 is the hard part in two different ways: 1) the people will actually have to learn how to take advantage of the features (for the past 3 1/2 years we've all but completely mastered 1.0 quite imtimately, what works, what doesn't work, why things work...). We can debug some of the most perplexing problems in our sleep because we are so familiar with the technology. and 2) taking the leap of faith and actually overhauling our pages to take advantage of 2.0. This isn't so bad. We are regularily in the habbit of rewriting old pages/subsystems about ever year for improvements, efficience, new design, lack of robustness in current design to meet new business rules. In all cases, nothing is properly designed (welcome to the realworld).

All this said, I'm looking forward to 2.0. So is everyone else. But I have a sneaking suspicion no one (even myself, who has only used 2.0 for about a year now) really knows what we're getting into when we start the push. Exciting and freightning times these days are. I'm curious, just how "intimate" will I be in a year from now with the technology? Scary proposition considering the breadth of change in .NET 2.0 in general. Its not all about ASP.NET, its about everything as a whole and taking advantage of it.

Thanks,
Shawn

I forgot to add in my previous post... in with one of the biggest challenges with the push to adopt and utilize 2.0 is, well, I already stated that when we get our application to load on ASP.NET 2.0, the application itself will still be very much 1.x. This is because the ideas and techniques revolve heavily around 1.x thinking. We will, as a team, have to get our of our 1.x mindset and start thinking in 2.0 to really take advantage of it. I really fear that most people won't take it very seriously and they'll keep doing the tried-and-true.

I wonder how prevailling these issues will be in the industry as a whole.

Thanks,
Shawn