Revisiting and Old Project

It is always fun going back to an old project and add new features to it! At work, I recently got a request to add some reporting functionality to one of the sections an the application I built about a year ago. I had a blast going thru the code (in this case this is a 3-year old asp.net web site I built for an internal department at work) and quickly re-familiarized myself with how the application works and how it is structured. When I built this application, I used what would be described as a MVC like pattern to separate each layer of the application. My business objects (the models) talk to the database access layer (DAL) objects to interact with the database. The code behind files (the controllers) then fetch the appropriate data from the database which is then passed on to the views (aspx pages) then use these business objects to show and edit data to the users!

I was able to build the reporting feature pretty quickly (although at the time of this post I am still adding some finishing touches). Knowing what the customer wants and knowing how to best implement it allowed me to quickly build the different pages/sections in just under and hour or so. I also find it gratifying that even though I no longer use asp.net as my programming platform (I now use asp.net mvc for all new projects that I work on) I can still dig around and build/update something pretty quickly. Though I must admit that I had a bit of a challenge remembering the asp.net page life cycle … something I do not miss at all with asp.net mvc :)