Jeffrey Palermo 8:50 am on August 19, 2004  

Code-behind versus Design-behind versus Code-beside – level 200

Anders Norås’ posted an interesting article about the intent of code-behind.  He says doing:







<TITLE><%# GetResourceString(“PageTitle”) %></TITLE>


is better than doing this:







public class MyPage : System.Web.UI.Page {
     protected HtmlGenericControl Title;
     private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { 
          Title.InnerText=GetResourceString(“PageTitle”);
      }
}


On my team, there is much discussion about putting any function call int the aspx file whatsoever, so this strikes me as an interesting take.  Honestly, I do a mixture of both, but in the above case, I do exactly what the second code snippet does.  I do all programmatic manipulation in my code-behind file.  I try to have only markup in my aspx and ascx files. 


In v2.0, I imagine I would do the following:







public partial class MyPage{
      private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { 
          Header.Title = GetResourceString(“PageTitle”);
      }
}


And I really don’t agree that setting content in code is a bad thing to do.  If I was forbidden to do it, I would not be a very effective programmer at all.  For instance, I use a base page class to set the title of every page in my application.  There is no way that I am going to put a function call in the markup of every aspx just to set the title when I can do with one call in my base page.  That just doesn’t make sense. 


Anders, your method works well for mostly declarative pages, but I disagree with you.  I prefer the code method.