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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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Five Things I Hate About C#

Inspired by Brian D. Foy's entry and Titus Brown's one for Python, here are five things I hate about C#:

  1. You can't have methods whose signatures differ only in their return values. I think I understand why it might not have been a good idea in the past, but with VisualStudio.NET I don't see how anyone could get confused any longer.
  2. You can split a class into partial classes. Why you'd want to do that is beyond me. Luckily, it's a 2.0 thing so I was able to refrain from seeing it for most of my development life.
  3. virtual. I hate how you have to explicitly state which methods can be overridden by descendents.
  4. Constructor chaining. I wish it could be done like normal method overloading where you can have the constructor do something and then call another constructor. Again, I understand why that's not feasible since the CLR would have to divine when a constructor was being called by another constructor versus a normal call to limit object creation. But the way that it's handled currently obscures what's actually happening when it treats the called constructor as a sort of pass-through to another one.
  5. Documentation. This appears to be a universal language complaint. MSDN is quite comprehensive but shallow at the same time. Everything is minimally documented and I can generally start there. But I can almost never end there: I invariably have to go to places like CodeProject in order to get a decent example of the syntax in action. Even that is generally not the final word because I usually then have to go to the blogs to see if there's any "gotchas" involved in using the language construct. Oh, and MSDN does a horrible job of differentiating between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0--something I desperately need because I'm currently working in both versions of the framework.

That was a lot tougher than I thought. I had to comb through the code to find things that I hated that were specifically C# and not ASP.NET. C# is really quite a lovely language. In general, it's the bee's pajamas.

Just for grins, here's five things I hate about ASP.NET:

  1. WebControls. Yes, I generally can't stand WebControls. I'm quite obsessive about my HTML and CSS; a lot of that combination's power is stripped away when you use a WebControl because Microsoft makes a lot of assumptions about how you're going to be using them.
  2. AutoEventWireup defaults to true in 2.0. Okay, so I just talked about this one
    3. but it's so wrong to change the default like that.
  3. Application event lifecycle. There's really no adequate documentation about the ASP.NET sequence of events. This article from Peter Bromberg was the best I found. I ended up spending a lot of time in debugging trying to determine what is available when in the event sequence.
  4. I hate ViewState. It is nothing but massive bloat and there's almost always a better way of storing data. I've also had several utterly inexplicable errors caused by ViewState corruption or changing.
  5. PostBack. There's a reason why the <form> tag has an action attribute, Microsoft. I know that the Javascript trickery involved in POSTing to the same page allows for some nice automagical black-boxing. I just don't like that model of Web application development.

That one was a whole lot easier. I had to limit myself to just five.