For fun, Becky and I went to Maxwell Nissan to test drive a Murano.  I don't know why all the pictures are that nasty orange.  It looks much better in the silver or blue.  I've been itching to drive a car with variable transmission ever since I heard of a commercial implementation about 10 years ago.  I was very impressed with the transmission, which was well under 2000rpm at 65mph.  It leverages that technology to get fantastic mileage on an SUV.  The whole thing was pretty sweet.  Our salesperson, we'll call him "Ben" (because that was his name), said, "If you can feel it shift, I'll buy the car for you".  I found that to be only slightly amusing since it's impossible for the car to shift at all.

While we cannot afford the vehicle, they did set forth some interesting numbers on a lease.  With our Explorer not worth much on a trade-in, leasing seems like an interesting option.  I've heard it put, "just like buying a used car, you're paying for half of the car, but you get the new half."  Any opinions?

Just curious what experiences people have had with leasing.  I've heard some horror stories, that I mentioned to the sales-person.  They had pretty convincing rebuttals (rebuttals?  is that right?).  Tell me what you think.

Anyone going to PDC (wink wink) should check this out.

Also, Peter, looks like someone else is using your moniker.

[Technical]

After answering Peter's comment to my last entry on the threshold of complexity required before moving to an HttpHandler-based web application, I've done some more thinking.

I originally mentioned that threshold is reached when you start thinking about the application in terms of a flow or state machine, but that test would indicate everything but the most basic "list-of-standard-reports" web application would merit this approach.  While it is true that all of them would benefit from the approach, I think it's important to think about Microsoft's vision for ASP.net, which was to speed development, and provide a more power YET FAMILIAR framework for building web applications.

It's the familiar part that's most important.  People have been creating Handler-based solutions all along using ISAPI filters, and .NET reduces the complexity of this approach IMMENSLY using IHttpHandler, even thought it is significantly more complex than the classic ASP page model.  .NET reduced that effort as well.

I think .NET brings simplification to both approaches.  Most people creating handler-based approaches already have a significant amount of conceptual design in their current systems. and probably wouldn't use any canned solution for such an approach.  However, classic ASP developers were overdue for improvement.

I believe most applications would benefit from a handler-based solution, but without a standard coding model for this, most developers will feel more comfortable with the page-based model.  What's worse, Microsoft's suggested implementation still relies on the Page class, without explaining fully how to handle complex user interaction in this hybrid environment.

I'm afraid I haven't answered many questions.

[UPDATED 9:15 same day after reviewing dasBlog source code]

When should you stray?  As soon as you're ready.