http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Consider the complexity of the external interfaces with which a UI must interact: People. Designing for users is much harder than designing for a given platform or system architecture. Consider that your application must be "portable" across a vast number of users' eyes, ears and brains whose runtime behavior is complex and ill-defined. It sure makes a CPU or database look simple by comparison. The complexity of UI interactions will generally dwarf what's going on in the core code. This is particularly true if you consider all aspects of UI including the documentation, the usage conventions, the graphics design, the affordances, the controls, the shortcuts, the integration with other apps, the error diagnostics, the packaging, the training, the marketing, the installer, the maintenance, etc... In my experience UI concerns are often dramatically underspecified relative to the rest of the system and much behavior is left up to common convention or individual judgement. I've seen junior coders be frequently surprised when the "little details" and "finishing touches" end up taking more time than the larger strokes of the design did. This is particularly true when the feature team lacks a designer, an artist, a writer, or a representative user. Coders are notoriously bad at the tasks performed by these specialists. http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment4http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment4Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:39:02 GMTI am using Igloo, so it drastically cuts the amount of code that I need to handle. If you have a lot of code in your code behind, then you are usually mixing concerns together, both business logic (controler) and presentation (view). http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment3http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment3Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:52:31 GMTWould you say the amount of code is more or less for UI using MonoRail or some other MVP architecture versus the traditional WebForms? WebForm code behind files are notorious for becoming insanely long. I've seen 2K lines in a code behind file WAY too often. http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment2http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment2Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:09:00 GMTI used to tell my junior devs that they should not think coding a pleasant UI is one of the easiest parts of the project. And that's because the "U" has a historic tendency to break and bitch about the "I" http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment1http://ayende.com/2287/development-stats#comment1Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:04:21 GMT