Kobe, a black-eye to the entire community...

Welcome to the second of (hopefully) many posts on .NET development, software, architecture and Internet "stuff" I find interesting!

While I had intended on writing about the process of a new project, kick-start methods, practices and getting a project "feel-good factor" going, Kobe, the community sample ASP.NET MVC was released and well, since this was supposed be a starting point for a properly implemented architecture, I felt I needed to throw my two cents in!



As of this writing, it appears that Microsoft has pulled Kobe off the shelf.

After many, many, less-than-stellar reviews of it's new sample application for MVC, they were forced to remove it based on "community feedback." Really? It's more like "community uprising." If you haven't had the pleasure yet, feel free to read some of the reviews above. I'm not going to rehash them but it's bad. It's really just embarrassingly bad code that quite frankly should have NEVER seen the light of day. No unit tests, no methodology, useless interfaces, and sadly, incorrectly implemented CORE features of ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft developed ASP.NET MVC to improve architecture. How could this happen you might ask?


I'm no stranger to bad code (I've certainly written enough in my day...LOL.) however, much of my consulting practice work came from failed offshore projects. This WREAKS of offshore development by untrained junior developers simply given a task to a time frame to complete it.

That's likely what they did. "Magic strings," useless return values and massive blocks of repeated code are all hallmarks of junior developers' work. So what now? Well, my guess is they'll tap someone from the alt.net community to re-write the entire application from scratch. That's the only thing that can really be done. There's no salvation.

My hope is that ASP.NET MVC can recover quickly from this stumbling block in the eyes of the community and going forward, let experienced developers implement blueprint applications. It makes it that much more difficult to justify using ASP.NET and MS tools against Java, RoR, PHP, etc when other developers can tell clients that the technology is crappy and the community puts out bad code. Perhaps the worst part about it is that as of right now... it's true.