WISA Job Board

This is a single-organization job board application made using the Microsoft stack.

Year: March 2018
Software: Microsoft Visual Studio

Since it's WISA-stack software, it uses Windows, IIS, SQL Server and ASP.NET.
The ASP.NET version used was MVC 5. The language is C#.

The application is a simple form with a file upload:

The authenticated organization's user may then view submitted applications:

The WISA Experience

In terms of revisit-ability; the ease of "getting back into" a framework after some time,
I would rate ASP.NET quite low.
Despite having config files of packages and specific versions, this project out-of-the-box came with ambiguous fatal errors.

Eventually I was able to find a right combination of upgraded and non-upgraded versions which started to give coherent errors.
From there, the next challenge was understanding migrations for this framework.
What I left for my future self in the Readme file was a step called "Run migrations", which was not too helpful for the forgetful self.

And so there was the second main issue I have with ASP.NET: Official documentation is a mess.
While Microsoft does provide a large amount of documentation, the organization of said information is spaghetti.
Within pages of text, there will be other guides linked within guides, but those linked guides will end up being incompatible with your framework version, or it would link to guides for entirely other frameworks.
It didn't help that Microsoft uses confusing product naming, such as the two framework types being "MVC Core" and "MVC 5", where the two frameworks have quite different ways of operating.

Another interesting thing with Microsoft tools is their bipolar way of doing UX.
It's either an absolutely packed interface with menus, submenus, and decisions required by the user which aren't made completely obvious without detailed reading.

On the other hand, you may get the modern Microsoft "Hang on! We're just getting things ready for you!" with absolutely no other information.

Funnily enough the install hanged on that vague step for 30 minutes before it was aborted..