the stateless web: it will always bite you!

i spent good part of the day building a little control to upload documents for our crm tool today. because i wanted to give the customer the ability to decide how many files she wants to upload at runtime, i put a little "add another file button" on the control, which would dynamically let the user add another file.

as soon as i had this dynamic functionality built, i threw it on the control where it was supposed to go (yes, my control was nested inside another control, which was then placed on the page where the upload functionality was needed). unbeknown to me, the person who had written this page was also dynamically loading his control; unfortunately, he was only loading the control on the pageload, and not on the postback.

for about an hour i kept trying to figure out why the button onmy control wasn't firing its events. finally, in frustration, i decided to step through all of the code: as soon as I saw the pageload i realized what was going on: my control wasn't firing events on the postback because it wasn't even there when the page submitted!

most developers know that web-apps are stateless, but i think we fail to internalize what this really means. we assume that once we declare a variable, it will remain there as long as it's in scope. i'm not trying to blame my co-worker; in fact, i've made this same mistake several times (which is probably why i recognized it almost immediately). i think the problem is we first learn to program in statefull environments, and then make the switch to the web without fully understanding the implication of moving to this new environment.

anyhow, i'm somewhat upset over the fact that i didn't get to finish the control today. i'm planning on getting up early tomorrow, coming in before anyone can bug me and getting the control done - that is until i run into the next nuisance from the stateless web, i guess.

google analytics statistics

i was just reviewing some stats from google analytics, and just want to summarize some things i found interesting.

i'm getting about 30 unique visitors every month; i have to admit, however, that i'm probably 3 of those. most of my traffic is organic and comes through google search (surprise, surprise!).

my most visited blog entry, is the one i had on particle swarm optimization in c#. my guess is that a whole bunch of lazy college students are looking for code so that they won't have to think in order to do their assignment. the traffic that this post gets is so much grater than anything else i've written, that i'm thinking about catering to lazy C.S college students ;)

the other blog entries that get quite a bit of traffic, are the ones on biztalk tips; i can see why this is since there aren't actually that many people that blog about biztalk.

from looking at the reports, however, i'm starting to learn the importance of writing so that you'll come up in search queries. i have an entry, for example, titled "do i really need an orchestration?"; a much better title would have been "when to use an orhestration", or something like that.

i'm excited about the little traffic i'm getting: there's some dude in sweeden that spent 15+ minutes on my site - i didn't even know that i had 15+ minutes worth of material on my blog! even though it's hard to find time to blog, i'll increase my efforts to do so. like jeff atwood, i've found that it truly is almost as much fun to blog about coding as actually writing code is.