Bits and bobs

The last two major projects I have worked on in the last two years, have been major business application written in asp.net. Since the upgrade to the shinny new IE7, user have been able to open sites in multiple tabs, and since about 2 weeks into mass adoption on IE7 and the understanding of how tabs work, everyone has instantaneously become dependant on running in multiple tab . Here lieth the problem. The applications are all written using the same framework, which relies heavily on session state to store page state information. Without session state, the application craps itself, literally. The design of IE7 tab (and before you go complaining about crappy MS, firefox is designed the same way) any additional tabs opened in the same window share the same session. This equates to vital session information such are the current record id to be overwritten by the new tabs selection. Major boo boo for application state. to make things worse, the framework requires the same session inform...

I recently started a project which required the re-design of the system to enable a highly configurable architecture. The system itself is already built on a framework which enabled a whole bunch of cool functionality and patterns. One of these functionalities was a business rule meta data collection object which provided meta data about fields. This function provides meta data down to the UI (for rendering required field/field visibility etc), and also consistent automated validation of business rules. The benefit of this approach is the business rules are set in 1 place. No need for any logic to be processed in the UI making the UI like a dumb renderer , in that this layer renders stuff, and that's it. This also means unit testing can have a much higher impact as we can test our business logic. So with this design in mind I started building a configuration structure which allowed the setup of this meta data. There by allowed business rules to be set via this database configur...