Think for a moment about the concept of the flamethrower. Okay? The flamethrower. Because we have them. Well, *we* don't have them, the army has them. That's right. We don't have any flamethrowers. I'd say we're fucked if we have to go up against the army, wouldn't you? But we have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, "Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I'm way to far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them." Well, it might have ended right there, but he mentioned it to his friend. His friend who was good with tools. And about a month later, he was back. "Hey, quite a concept!" WHHOOOOOOOOSSHHH! And of course the army heard about it, and they came around. "We'd like to buy about five hundred-thousand of them please. We have some people we'd like to throw flame on. Give us five hundred thousand and paint them dark brown. We don't want anyone to see them."

- George Carlin, 1984

s/people/code/g

So I'm stuck. I have to fix an application that was born broken. I mean the architecture, the design, the implementation, all of it. Broken. What does work works entirely by accident.

The application is a web application. Written for the ASP.NET platform with C# underpinnings. Not an entirely bad choice of platforms. Until you start looking under the hood. It's a procedural mess wrapped up in pseudo classes that act as nothing more than namespaces. Exceptions are silently absorbed and rarely managed. The so-called data access layer is nothing short of frightening.

The worst part? It's something that I helped build several years ago. I hold my head in shame. Kind of. In fact, several years ago I birthed a framework using ASP.NET and C# that I called "Epicenter." Epicenter was an ultra thin implementation of the Apache Cocoon framework that used XML quite liberally to define application flow and data access and used XSLT for rendering XHTML output. It was neat but it wasn't mature enough to be used in a production environment. Sso the choice was made to use the standard ASP.NET WebForms. I got frustrated and have long since lost the code for Epicenter. If this were on fark, I'd clearly deserve the Dumbass tag.

All I can say about this today is: Ooops, where's that bloody flamethrower?