Jelle Druyts

I've just expressed my love for comments (which generated some interesting discussion as well) and a while ago I've been quite active in ASP.NET 2.0; so let me take the opportunity to raise a personal concern of mine when combining the two.

Remember that one goal of ASP.NET 2.0 was to reduce the code needed for typical scenarios by 70%. That's a lot and I don't have any metrics yet, but they've certainly managed to eliminate a lot of keypresses that I hope I will never need to break my fingers on again. They've also overhauled the databinding system (just look at the ObjectDataSource) to reduce code and you can even use the Web.config file to declaratively create a strongly-typed Profile, or couple all your pages to a common basepage to include boilerplate code.

So great! With all this, ASPX has definitely become a double-JITted programming language of its own - as Early & Adopter so beautifully put it during the last PDC.

The only problem I have with it, is that when hiding more and more code behind markup, where do we document what we're doing? We don't. Do you? Thought so... So come on, be nice: comment your markup when it gets anywhere near semi-complex.

And don't just write <!-- html comments --> either, but be sure to use the <%-- server-side comments --%> in ASP.NET, since they don't get sent out to the browser (which would increase your final page size and possibly even leak information about your business logic to the browser for everyone to see).

Still, this doesn't do anything to promote itself as metadata (that can be used by tools) like the well-known XML comments, so it's still fairly useless apart from serving as in-line documentation. But then again, if you're writing structured code that needs structured comments, you should really put it in code anyway, and not in markup.