Chapter 13: Windows Forms, Web Forms, and No Forms

An Introduction to Windows, ASP.NET, and Web Services Development

The legacy cobol mainframe development arena has typically held that online application development is more prestigious and preferable than batch/offline programming. As a result, you have probably had the displeasure of working with a few mainframe professionals ^[1] who were known for making these types of comments:

"You want me to work on a batch program? You can't be serious. No, thank you. I'm now a CICS programmer! I don't do batch. I haven't ˜done' batch in years and don't care to return to do any either. You'll have to get someone else, maybe one of the junior developers, to do it."

Most will agree that this type of attitude is always unhelpful (to put it nicely ), especially when the time comes to just "get the job done." Nonetheless, it does help highlight the fact that developing online applications has traditionally introduced the need for a different skill set, one that is typically found among more experienced developers. The resulting expectation for application performance and stability differs as well, in that it becomes more demanding.

Note  

Granted, a delayed evening batch run can delay the CICS region from coming up the next morning. End users are never happy when that happens. Still, there is usually a buffer, a window of time during nonbusiness hours, to correct any problems experienced during batch processing. This usually shields end users from being impacted by any problems experienced during the batch process.

Online application development presents a greater potential for immediate and noticeable impact to end users. Being a successful mainframe online developer, you have learned to be sensitive to this. You have learned over time the need to design your online application's interface with the goal of providing a pleasurable and exciting user experience. On the mainframe, your experience taught you that online development brings you much closer to your end users. You will find that .NET Windows and Web development shares (and possibly exceeds) this level of intimacy with end users.

In this chapter, you will dive into the portion of .NET Windows and Web development that surrounds the user interface. I will first present to you some user interface design considerations. From there, you will tackle the .NET Windows application and Windows Service technologies. An exploration of the Active Server Pages .NET (ASP.NET) Web application and Web service toolset will follow. Throughout the chapter, where appropriate, I compare some of the .NET user interface concepts to their equivalents found in the mainframe CICS and ISPF technologies.

Caution  

I described Chapters 3 and 4 as .NET retraining prerequisite chapters. I strongly suggest that you view Chapters 5 through 12 as prerequisite chapters as well. In other words, you should read and understand the content in the chapters that precede this chapter before you take on this chapter (or any chapter following this one). The earlier chapters (Chapters 5 through 12) provide a foundational understanding of the Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET) IDE, the .NET common language runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework, and how to work with SQL Server databases and XML. Each of these "foundational" topics will be used now, as you proceed forward in this chapter (and beyond) learning to build .NET Windows and ASP.NET applications.

^[1] I am using the term "professionals" rather loosely.