Butters Wonders About InfoPath 2007

Butters, the wondering dog, is wondering today about her owner’s use of InfoPath 2007.

Her owner has spent several days throwing together an InfoPath application for his employer and is quite happy with his work. Butters thinks that he should be ashamed because he is paid to be an “architect” and he has built an application his mother could probably get going in a pinch.

“But, Butters,” his owner exclaimed, “the point is to use the right tool for the job. I am just making a little form that business folks fill out and use to save XML documents. This is exactly what InfoPath is for, and it is so gosh, darned easy.”

“Oh,” replies Butters, “and I suppose there is validation logic and conditional formatting and other event automation going on in the form?”

“Uh, yes. Aren’t you a dog?”

“And I suppose all of those things are written right into the view, which is data bound directly onto the data sources?”

“Well, yeah. Aren’t bulldogs supposed to be one of the dumber breeds?”

“And didn’t you just blog about how easy the new MVC framework from Microsoft will make these things? Do you not promote yourself as one who can spin that code as quickly as clicking your way through the stupid InfoPath designer?”

“Yeah, I know, Butters. I am feeling kind of guilty about this.”

“You should, InfoPath Boy. You have all these great theories about separation of concerns, thin UI, and data abstraction, yet you solve a coding problem with InfoPath? You, sir, are not worthy of your peers.”

“Damn you, Butters. Damn you,” I replied.