People have a lot of different reasons for posting blog entries. These reasons vary from financial, to personal, to professional, to I'm afraid to know more. For me, one reason I take the time when I could be doing something else is that I like to put my ideas out there to be tested. I don't really care if a majority of people agree with me so much as I want to see what other people have to say for or against certain things. The downside to this is that I'll sometimes find that an idea isn't as good as I had originally thought it was. The upside is the opportunity to refine something to be better or to discard an idea that turns out simply to be bad.
Which is why I'm glad to see Karl Seguin's response to a post I had made about DataSets. Karl's a bright guy and he has a good background in the problem domain associated with DataSet objects. He displays class, too, even when he feels I've been a bit rough in a point or two.
The School of Hard Knocks
I empathize with his experience where DataSet misuse caused much pain and suffering. I've been in similar situations and it's no fun. In a full-blown business transaction environment, DataSets have some liabilities that make them ill-suited for business-layer usage. The thing is, the opposite problem exists as well, and it's one that is more serious than people want to give it credit for: a layer of specialized, hand-crafted business objects that don't actually do anything.
I'm currently working at a place that has an extreme case of this problem. We have four entirely separate ASP.Net applications for our internal invoice processing. All four of these applications have their own set of substantially similar custom objects that are completely unique for that application. Each object doesn't do anything more than contain a group of properties that are populated from a database and write changes back to it.
I shudder to think how many hours were wasted on this travesty. It's over-complex, can't leverage any type of automated binding, doesn't track row state, and testing and debugging changes is an unmitigated pain. It's like someone attended an n-tier lecture somewhere and never bothered understanding what the point of having one actually was. Frankly, I'd prefer if the previous developers had simply put all the data access right in each individual page--at least that'd be easier to fix when something blew up.
Learning Your Craft
The thing is, my experience no more proves custom business objects wrong than Karl's experience proves DataSets wrong. That's the trouble with anecdotal experience: it feels more important than it is (it doesn't help that pain is such an efficient teacher).
The trick of learning a craft is in gaining experience that is both specific and broad. This can be tricky in a field that is as immense as software development. You really have no choice but to specialize at some point. Even narrowing it down to ".Net Framework" isn't nearly enough to constitute adequate focus for competence.
Unfortunately, Karl's point that there are a lot of lazy programmers out there is true. Anyone who has had to hire or manage programmers will confirm this. Too many developers don't bother learning enough of their craft to be considered actually competent. Faced with the need to specialize carefully, many simply give up and learn only enough to get by (and sometimes not even that much). They're content to learn the bare minimum needed to get hired. They'll learn enough of the "how" to create a program without ever bothering to learn any of the "why".
Teaching Others
I have a minor problem with Karl's explanation, though. He says, "I advocate against the use of DataSets as a counterbalance to people who blindly use them." While I understand this position, I'm not sure I can be said to appreciate it. It smacks a little of the "for your own good" school of learning; which works well enough in a parent-child or even teacher-student relationship. I'm not sure it works so well in public or general discourse.
It is hard to correct bad habits, particularly habits as widespread as DataSet misuse seems to be. As one who often has the bad habits to be corrected, though, I think that I'd prefer having the problem explained and given the context so I can understand the trade-offs being made. That would give me the opportunity to know why something is wrong, not just that something is wrong.
That'd require discussing DataSets in specific instead of general terms. I'm not sure if Karl would really want to do that, though. I mean, his specialty at CodeBetter is really ASP.Net. Expecting him to tackle ADO.Net is not just unrealistic, it could have the effect of diluting his blog posts and alienating his regular readers or getting him embroiled in things he's less interested in.
I would like to see someone respectable and wider-read than I am take on Strongly-typed DataSets in a more complete fashion, though.
Professor Microsoft
Which is why I have to agree with Karl that the blame for DataSet misuse lies squarely in Microsoft's court. I stopped counting how many official articles and examples from Microsoft included egregious misuse or abuse of DataSets. And I have yet to see any that describe how to do it right or what kinds of things to look for in determining the trade-offs between a Strongly-typed DataSet and a more formal OR/M solution, let alone ameliorating factors for each. The only articles about DataSets that I can remember that don't actually teach bad habits are articles about how bad they are. Which isn't helpful. It'd be nice to have something, somewhere that talks about using them wisely and what their strengths actually are. Maybe that should be a future blog post here...