When Web UI Component Frameworks like ASP.NET WebForms and JSF were invented in the early years of this decade, they were an honest attempt to bring an additional layer of abstraction to the web. This layer was supposed to improve a couple of things, especially in the areas of usability, developer productivity, extensibility and out-of-the-box features. They were also created to attract the old guard of desktop developers, that spend so many years to learn and master their craft.

To accomplish that mission, these frameworks were composed of hundreds of invisible components to form a feature-rich environment based on abstraction and simulation. This environment targeted one specific thing: hiding away as much of the original web infrastructure as possible. To accomplish that goal, Microsoft, Sun and others created complex workarounds to overcome some of the “serious limitations” of the web. Those features were given fancy names like Postback, ViewState and CodeBehind, which we all know and have to live with every day.

The problem with these techniques is that they are not only an additional layer of abstraction, they are actually based on some quite different paradigms. At some point that inevitably creates major problems if you want to create “real” web applications and you find yourself searching for solutions to problems that you might not even have if you hadn’t started to use those frameworks in the first place.

When some developers began to realize that these heavy-weight component-oriented frameworks started to decrease their productivity, they did a very clever thing. Instead of reverting completely back to old frameworks like the original Struts or ASP, they took all the great things that the Web UI Component Frameworks had brought to light, merged them with those frameworks and included new techniques and approaches that emerged over the last few years. The result of these efforts are frameworks like ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, Grails and Spring MVC that handle requests on the server-side much more naturally and effectively, and frameworks like JQuery, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, Flex and Prototype, that handle user interaction on the client-side.

The way of web development has changed and as I wrote in my post about this topic about a year ago, it’s time to rethink now. Don’t miss this one, it is a big one.

“The largest thing on earth is the human ego.” is one of that statements that remain true no matter what – probably today more than ever. In the beginning of this year, I was quite active on various social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In the beginning, it was really a lot of fun, seeing all the things my friends were doing and what was going on around me. Unfortunately, that feeling has changed. When I open Facebook these days, the only feeling I get is disgust about the grandstanding and ego-casting that is happening there way to much. It is the same thing that happens if people get to much attention in the real world: They get supercilious, start to actually need all the attention and feel obligated to attract all the approval of the other people around them.

The sad thing about that development is that Twitter and Facebook could really bring value to our world. They could help to stay in contact, to bring people closer together over large distances and they can help this world to overcome some of the biggest problems we face today: Biased media, censorship and ignorance.

The good thing is: Publicity is one of the most volatile things there are, and therefore, I expect those self-exposing images to be gone a certain while from now. And if we get lucky, someone will fill that void with sustainability and balance by using those great ideas for something useful.

ADO.NET Data Services is Microsoft’s new services framework for accessing data from remote clients using HTTP and other disconnected protocols by sending either LINQ or URI’s queries to a specialized DataService<T>. DataService<T> is connected to the underlying data source and can perform read, update, delete and create operations against any data framework with a sufficient data context implementation, for example LINQ-to-SQL or the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

While it is possible to create components that intercept the data operations at the service level, ADO.NET Data Services has been specifically designed to support CRUD operations performed by remote clients. That means, for the time being, there is no support for accessing and invoking business logic components over DataService<T> or for returning custom response messages based on data structures that are not managed by the underlying data context. That in turn means that business logic has to reside on the client (maybe even written in JavaScript) and can easily be manipulated. It also means that arbitrary clients can run all operations against every exposed interfaces of DataService<T> (which is a matter of configuration).

WCF and the DataTransferObjectManager on the other hand allow you to selectively open your API to external clients and provide a consistent interface for business operations beyond create, read, update and delete scenarios, regardless of the underlying data structures and without any affiliation to a specific data framework. They also allow you to invoke service operations that access repositories and business logic components while still returning only the necessary parts of large object graphs to the client.

ADO.NET Data Services (and the upcoming .NET RIA Services) are great frameworks with a lot of potential value, but for the time being they do not solve the problem of accessing any kind of API call through service operations without having to worry about large and deeply interconnected object graphs. This is where DTOM and the ServiceToolkit.NET step in, which we will release in a couple of days on CodePlex.

In case you didn't know: I'm somewhat addicted to EverNote, especially since they released Windows Mobile and iPhone clients in addition to the desktop (Windows and Mac) and Web editions. It's the easiest way to capture board drawings, business cards, things you need to buy (for example if you have an empty milk pack, just take a picture) and all those other things around you. Everything is instantly synced and available everywhere  something I really expected from OneNote, but that may happen in the future. A couple of days ago, Evernote released a Twitter integration and the new iPhone client 2.0. Because of the Twitter support, you can now even use SMS to send short notes and other stuff to you universal inbox (which is one of the most important parts of GTD methodology) - just great!