ASP.NET Simplicity -- When Is Too Much Simplicity a Bad Thing

This is a good post to read, plus all the comments.  Many developers have real concerns about ASP.NET 2.0 and the direction it's taken.  ASP.NET 1.X is a very good product.  I'm really not so sure about ASP.NET 2.0.

I'd like to see Microsoft step up to the plate here and instead of saying it's "working as designed" say "we are listening to your feedback and we are going to slip the release date so we can do it right".

I've thought about trying to stick with ASP.NET 1.X, but there are just so many (too many?) obstacles.  I can't throw out all of Visual Studio 2005 just because I'm not happy with the breaking changes to ASP.NET 2.0.  I really like most of the VS 2005 non-ASP.NET 2.0 related changes.  I even like some of the ASP.NET 2.0 non-breaking changes.

I'm sure there are a lot of people watching to see what Microsoft does with this one.  Backward compatibility matters.

As a Windows user, running applications from the command line is a major pain in the ass (if I preferred working from the command line, I would use Linux).  Yet, with NAnt, there is little choice but to open a command prompt.  Well, there is an open source project called NAntRunner that allows you to run NAnt from a VS.NET Add-In, but that doesn't look like what I want either as I often have to close VS.NET to allow NAnt to overwrite the DLLs VS.NET has locked (I believe this is a bug in VS.NET) and if I want to build a single solution, I just do that in the normal VS.NET way anyway.

So, I often open a command prompt, run a batch file to add nant.exe to my path (I intentionally change my path and other environment variables in an environment specific batch file so I'm sure to always grab the proper version of the applications for that particular development/build environment) and then start cd'ing around to different directory to run the minimal set of NAnt targets I need to get the job done.

So, I did a google search for how to add a right click "Open Command Prompt Here" to Windows File Explorer, so I can at least start the command prompt in an arbitrary directory quickly and easily.  There are some excellent options for this feature here.  I chose option 3 as it was simple and low risk (I can easily undo it - there is no "magic").

This makes running NAnt that much more tolerable, but I think what I really want is a Windows File Explorer Add-In to run NAnt for an arbitrary target in an arbitrary environment, running an arbitrary batch file to initialize the environment first.  It seems very doable, but just doesn't interest me enough to actually implement it.

And why does a google search for "NAnt Runner" (notice the subtle space between the words) return nothing useful?  Hmm...  MSN search would have at least gotten me where I needed to go with a couple of non-obvious clicks, but there still isn't a direct link on the first page of results.  Not that I have much search engine power, but I'm going create this link anyway in hopes that it helps other people: NAnt Runner.