A friend of mine has been in school for programming now for nearly 2 years and getting his associates really soon.  Good for him!  On and off he's come and asked me some questions about how to approach certain problems, most of which have been fairly easy to me so I was happy to help and walk him though some of the confusing aspects.  No sweat.

About 2 days ago he approached me about his senior project and that they were doing a website and needed some help with editing, updating employee info.  He also noted that just getting data was a huge pain and took hours for them to get it to work.  No problem, that's easy stuff.  I busted out my favorite ORM tool (subsonic!!!) and showed him how to make his data access life easy.  None of this inline sql crap.  Then I discovered something downright offensive.

We all know architechure is important.  Someone forgot to tell them that.  Further, they didn't seek out any assistance and went crazy.  What they ended up with was a horrific db structure and data access the hardest way known to man (by hand using the object data source).  I kid you not there's a page, an aspx page that has over 1000 lines and its just displaying simple address info, nothing more.  Adding more pain, instead of using 1 page as a one stop shop, every CRUD operation is broken up into individual pages.  View the data over here, edit it over there and save it somewhere else.  I'm not joking.  Just to step it up a notch, the naming conventions are "NewUser" (new employee), "Employee Management" (editing employee data) and "ManagePhoneNumbers" (just to edit phone numbers).  In their defense, the graphics and layout aren't bad, B+.  The links and useability, F.

What are they teaching these students?!  Are the professors this far removed from the real world?  This isn't the first time I've heard of teachers being way way off base and furthers my desire to teach.  It's terrible, sad and pathetic.