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Yeah, I'm replacing a ColdFusion site at work with a MVC site.
The database also has to be rebuilt from the ground up as the old one is so infested with ColdFusion garbage that it's impossible to adapt it to new requirements without scraping it and rebuilding anyway.
Sooooo the data in about 10 badly designed tables (yes, that's the entire database) is being migrated to a database that now spans 96 tables! I absolutely HATE tables that span 200 to 300 columns!
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: I absolutely HATE tables that span 200 to 300 columns!
Is this something imposed by CF or just a bad DB? To me when I see crap like "wipes your backside for you" I think of things like FoxPro with its oddities.
Jeremy Falcon
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Both.
The CF code does some weird things with radio buttons and checkboxes. To mark options as selected in the website, it writes a string of character values to a database field, either as a bunch of characters packed together or comma separated.
The real pain in the ass is that these fields are fixed length in the database and there's no room for new options in these lists.
The existing site was written by a bunch of different people at different times and nobody had any clue as to what they were doing with databases.
And now replacing the site has fallen on a friend of mine and myself. We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Been there, done that. Good luck with it.
Jeremy Falcon
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: We're 18 months into this project and were finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
That's just a freight train coming your way.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I hope not! But, yeah, my partner and I have both thought the same thing at various times during this project.
We go Beta in about another 6 to 8 weeks.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: written by a bunch of different people at different times
Power users dontcha love em. The people that keep us in work. Let them kludge a solution together, let it become core to the business and THEN get a professional to rewrite and migrate the data.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Professional?? What professional? Where is this person you speak of?
You are correct as the existing site is the main system used during my teams primary function.
Sadly, migrating the data is what's taking most of the time in this project. I've got a extensible data importer framework built and a bunch of importers interpreting, correcting, filtering, and normalizing the data on-the-fly during import into the new database.
It's also being used to sanity check and test the EF model for the new database during the migration.
There's nothing like tearing down a site that's been built (badly) over the last 10 years and rebuilding it from scratch.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: tearing down a site that's been built (badly) over the last 10 years
Thankfully I only do LOB work that does not include web (until Silverlight came along) so I usually have to deal with Access and Excel (used as a database) and the myriad of redundant, duplicated sheets and forms created.
My usual data transform is a bunch of sql scripts that end in truncate everything so I can repeat again and again and again.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Power users dontcha love em. The people that keep us in work. Let them kludge a solution together, let it become core to the business and THEN get a professional to rewrite and migrate the data.
This is why MS Access needs to burn!!
Jeremy Falcon
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: he CF code does some weird things with radio buttons and checkboxes.
FTFY 
Dave Kreskowiak wrote: The existing site was written by a bunch of different people at different times and nobody had any clue as to what they were doing with databases.
FTFY
Dave Kreskowiak wrote: And now replacing ... We're 18 months into this project
Nice billing by any measure. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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I'm not an independent. I work for the largest insurer in Michigan and am not a developer per-see by trade.
I'm a "jack of all trades" systems engineer and admin who just happens to write a TON of code to make my life, and my teams life, much easier. I write everything from simple little scripts to automation tools and plugins to entire business process applications that support technical teams. It's kind of hard to describe my skill set other than to plagiarize: "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a " very valuable asset to any team I'm on.
Truthfully, this is the first website I've ever designed and written on this kind of scale and the first time I'm working with another developer on the same project. The best part about this project is the enormous pile of stuff I, and the woman I'm working with on it, have had to learn "on-the-fly":
MVC/Razor
Entity Framework 5 (CodeFirst)
CSS/HTML5
jQuery
JavaScript (I'm not a web dev by trade and neither is she)
Kendo UI for ASP.NET/MVC
Team Foundation Server and the nuances of Source Control in a team environment
Working with other developers
a new appreciation for the phrase "breaking the build" (we've both done this ONCE)
and a completely new perspective on why web devs hate IE
She had to learn even more, like the entire list I mentioned, ASP.NET and C#. She's NEVER even seen the inside of Visual Studio before this project nor any real experience with "C" type or OOP languages. HOLY SH*T has she impressed me with her ability to pick this stuff up entirely on her own! The only thing I gave her an overview of was what MVC stood for and the basic idea of what each of those pieces does. It's nice to find someone who's just as exceptional at adapting to new stuff as I am. She's a very rare find indeed.
I know this sounds like a couple of newbs just fumbling around until we get something to "work". I can assure you that is FAR from the case. We've both put our reputations on the line on this project and agreed to deliver the "slick and awesome" experience management, and the rest of the team, wants. During concept and pre-Alpha build presentations we have consistently been told we're delivering an experience far better than envisioned.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: we have consistently been told we're delivering an experience far better than envisioned.
Good work. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: FoxPro with its oddities.
On my short list is writing a few exports from an old FoxPro system.  Initial findings were that there was a sort of summary/detail thing going on where the detail data is stored in a comma-delimited string in a field in the summary record itself...they had already reached the 255 column limit, and I suppose it was the logical way around that limitation.  Unfortunately, this makes aggregates on the detail data (which is what I need) impossible! Even worse, this is an extension of an older import written in VB6, which was not migrated as we had assumed all customers had moved out of the stone age! I'm putting this one off for as long as possible.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: I absolutely HATE tables that span 200 to 300 columns!
 I'm glad I haven't eaten my dinner yet.
Marc
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I saw one database with 1 table that had over 5000(!) columns. There were two other tables, both with about 2000 columns.
The database file (it was homebrewed) was over 4 GB in size.
I am very glad that I don't have to work with that!
The database was used in a VB.NET 2002 application, and that code.... well... (This application was being written in 2013(!!!))
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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Wow! and I thought we had it bad!
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The application never was released.
The company that was working on this was owned by a friend of mine, and the customer saw how this was going and canceled the contract. The company went bankrupt the next month. They were in existence for only two years.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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Brisingr Aerowing wrote: The company went bankrupt the next month. They were in existence for only two years
Your friend or the customer?
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My friend. The customer is still going strong (AFAIK)
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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Brisingr Aerowing wrote: My friend
Yikes. That had to put you in a weird spot when you heard the news and knew why it folded.
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Brisingr Aerowing wrote: The company that was working on this was owned by a friend of mine, and the customer saw how this was going and canceled the contract. The company went bankrupt the next month. They were in existence for only two years.
Two years too long by the way it sounds. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Can anyone explain to me a good reason why anyone would use CF outside of "it's just what we know"?
You explained it perfectly. The only people who use CF is because it is just what they know.
Unfortunately, I was on a government contract where the project lead didn't know anything about programming. She trusted this bozo who pushed for CF over strenuious objections from me and most everybody else.
He claimed he could implement a dashboard in 3 days. After 3 months we got the POS up but it was plagued with problems.
Eventually, he had a nervous breakdown and disappeared from the contract for 5 weeks. By the time he returned someone else had taken over as lead developer and talked Angry Bird (our nickname for the clueless lead - she also would throw temper tantrums) into changing the architecture from CF to C# (it was a SharePoint site).
Wacko returned and was eventually dismissed because he couldn't work with other people being in charge of the direction the project was going. He was a megalomaniac who thought his idea was the only way to go.
We implemented the project and it started working without those pesky problems the CF version had.
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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JimmyRopes wrote: He claimed he could implement a dashboard in 3 days. After 3 months we got the POS up but it was plagued with problems.
Ha. Totally sounds like an environment I just came out of where the original devs used a lot of FoxPro. A lot of times it's just charisma that sells this stuff to management since they really don't know any better about the tech side of things.
JimmyRopes wrote: We implemented the project and it started working without those pesky problems the CF version had.
I never bought into it. I'm just surprised to still see ads for it on CP, it's up to version 11. I suppose if Crystal Reports can last that long, anything can.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Totally sounds like an environment I just came out of where the original devs used a lot of FoxPro.
There are a lot of products developed so non-programmers can say they program.
The problem is that they don't have a clue about good coding practices and their results are usually plagued with easily avoidable problems. 
Jeremy Falcon wrote: I'm just surprised to still see ads for it on CP, it's up to version 11. I suppose if Crystal Reports can last that long, anything can.
I have never used Crystal Reports. Never saw the need when there were reporting facilities available in Office Interop.
We already had a license for Office so why but another licensed product to do what you already can do.
I could be mistaken but by the testimony of the CR evangelists it sounds like one of those so simple anyone can use it products. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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