Revamping "My Baby Name Game"

Posted under Blog Posts, Software Design

The old Visual Studio 2002 sure did a sloppy job with HTML… or should I say “html” because of the capitalization conventions. VS 2005/2008 does a much better job of capitalization and helping you deal with the open/close tag pairs.  (I’m blaming the old VS 2002 for the problems because to do otherwise would imply that I am not perfect.)

As I revamp the www.mybabynamegame.com website, I am finding that there is a lot of html cleanup to do in this site;  Missing tags, incorrect tag nesting, etc.  I’m pulling out all of the <TABLE>’s and replacing them with <div>’s to support CSS, and I’m fixing the tag capitalization while I’m there.  It is tedious and unrewarding grunt work.  I’m also changing the graphics and AJAX-ifying the site with the AJAX extender toolkit, so I might as well do it all at the same time.

Even though the underlying C# code that I wrote 5 years ago is a bit outdated, there is also a lot that is right about it, too.  For one thing… it still works, and it is easy to understand. 

Before I reviewed the code in depth, I had considered refactoring the whole thing for the MVC framework.  Now that I have seen the code, there is no way that I want to implement the MVC framework underneath this old maiden.  Doing so would be a bit like doing a heart transplant on a perfectly-healthy 50 year-old.  Let’s just do a bit of a face lift, some teeth whitening, and some angioplasty.

Anyone want to play it when I publish the changes?  E-mail me for a Gift Certificate.