Microsoft Doesn’t Get Web Design

April 24, 2009 | David Raffauf

At the risk of sounding like a whiny designer, I’m going to blast Microsoft for a minute.  They don’t get the web, or typical job roles for web teams.  My question to Microsoft is why would should a designer have to learn to program, or why should a programmer have to learn to design, in order to build a web app together?

Let’s just get it out of the way that the “design” mode is useless for building pleasant web experiences.  It’s good for desktop apps and people making a living off tutorial books.  But it isn’t web ready.

Therefor, I’ve spend most of my time in Microsoft’s front-end .cs files on a C# project.  If you want to pull any values generated by the codebehind files you need to know object instance names and properties.  I don’t mean that you need to be able to choose them from a context menu, you have to have the developer give you a list or resort to digging through their code.  This is insane.  PHP and Rails make this much easier.  Also, if you want to loop over some data it’s the same deal.  You have to use a repeater control or something similar.

Smarty in PHP had this designer/developer relationship nailed years ago.  Rails also took a rather intuitive approach with some basic programming tools that a designer could quickly grasp.  Microsoft is seriously lagging.

What this means to your web team is that either your designers will be sifting through code or that your coders will be writing placeholder interfaces for designers.  Neither of these are good situations, and will build unhealthy resentment and animosity within your team.

Another problem with Visual Studio / .Net is that you do not have control over the final HTML that is spit out.  The IDs on all controls get rendered dynamically.  This rules out doing cool things easily with Prototype, Scriptaculous or other javascript libraries.  Sometimes there are ways to work around it, but they take a lot more time and are less than ideal.

Also, prepare to have SPANs and DIVs peppered throughout your design where you don’t want them.  And don’t try to remove them, Microsoft sees these as unobtrusive code changes. This is the markup equivalent of having a dozen semicolons randomly inserted into your programming code, with no ability to remove them.  Have fun!

The Visual Studio IDE is also obtrusive.  It doesn’t simply suggest changes, it will alter your code when you don’t want it to.  A common Prototype ID selector is $(‘ID_HERE’).PROPERTY_HERE, but good luck typing that in Visual Studio without erasing a bunch of auto-filled suggestions.

I guess my basic gripe about working with .Net and Visual is that developing with it doesn’t match real world job roles.  It feels like they figured out a way to spit out desktop apps on the web and never examined what’s different online and off.  And their editor is like an annoying kid that keeps trying to prove why he’s smarter than you.

I’m sure .Net (C#) is an amazing tool for building scalable web services.  I’m not a big Microsoft fan but I do understand that they can make useful tools, especially for the enterprise.  But Microsoft, please don’t pretend to offer a useful tool for creating front-end web interfaces.