OK, after my last post, I had to just sit down and try a few things. One of the things I had to try was to write an app the old fashioned way (code heavy form, no DOM {Domain Object Model}, no framework). Pretty much a horizontal application.

It was even more frustrating than the mountains of code I have been writing in building DOMs. I don’t know if I’ve become completely dependent on having a good architecture to code against or if I’ve simply lost the patience to write such disposable code.

I know Mark Miller hates intellisense, but I live by it. I can write much more code with many less keystrokes with it. And many of my mistakes are caught by the compiler instead of in testing. And I think that’s the item I’m not going to be able to do without by not building a DOM for all of my apps. If I do build a DOM, most of the problems are caught before testing. And the errors that are caught in testing are problems that are common among the objects in the DOM and can be resolved across the board.

With that said, I think that the problem is not in the architecture, but in the tools. If I had a tool to deal with the mundain DAL and the generic data portion of the BOL then most of my frustrations would be eliminated.

Someone once said, when all you have is a hammer, then all you see are nails. We need more tools to help build better apps.