Not All Bad

The bright side of all the people that are leaving the office is the wealth of surplus computer components it has left open. Today I appropriated a second video card and monitor for my setup here, which makes the SharePoint develoopment I am doing in a virtual machine environment so much easier. I can have the VM running on one screen and the host OS up on the other and dispense with the pain-in-the-ass of constantly switching windows.

Mind you, it would be a lot nicer if I was still working with a product that allows remote development so I didn't have to actually be in the VM to do anything, but whatever.

Bloody Microsoft

SharePoint gives me a headache. This product is a dog's breakfast. There are hundreds of "templates" that aren't really templates because they are largely similar and the bits that could be templated because they do exactly the same damn thing aren't, and if you want to make a change you can't just do a search and replace because they are ever so subtly different even though they are functionally identical. One "template" will have a table cell <td valign="top">, another will have <td valign=top>, and another will have just <td>. Gah! Even if you want to just alter the cascading style sheet to make "site wide" design changes, you are fucked, because in one template a table row will have one class, in another the a differently named class in the individual cells does the same job, and in yet another there are div tags doing the same damn thing under a different class name and the damn blocks are nested in a way that the styles conflict with each other. I don't think there is a single box element in the whole damn application that doesn't get set and reset at least three times before being rendered. And since the are multiple sloppy inheritances per object and that number of inheritances isn't strictly accounted for in the CSS specification (which wouldn't matter anyway since there isn't once single browser out there that strictly follows the specification even for relatively simple uses of CSS) cross-browser functionality is an utter disaster. Multiply that by 1,497 "templates".

And then there are the fun little "black-box" bits that Microsoft doesn't give you control over, like the main navigation buttons that nest inside one of these dog's breakfast tables. You have a row in a table that is already impossible to deal with site wide thanks to the hodge-podge of HTML in varying states of compliance and the four different classes applying to each of eight different nested box elements and inside that are nested these fun little black-box elements that render a single link inside a nine-cell table, each cell and row with a different class name, an ID tag that doesn't match, and — best of all — aren't consistent from link to link.

I swear to God, there are 13-year old girls on Xanga that do better web coding.

In the immortal words of Dilbert, this is why technology decisions should be left to those that know their mass from a black hole.