Take for example the first bit you’re likely to read at SubSonic’s webpage, bit which I presume is meant to explain what SubSonic does.  “SubSonic is A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt that works up your Data Access…”  I like Batman, especially since Christopher Nolan rebooted the franchise.  But I don’t care about Batman with relation to software projects.  I still don’t really know what SubSonic is after having read that.  Is it an ORM?  Is it a set of functions similar to MySQL access in PHP?  I don’t know, and they don’t seem to want to tell me.

I can stomach cleverness to about the same degree I can stomach horseradish.  It ought to enhance the content, and it can in the right hands.  The SubSonic authors WAY overdo it, and their writing style hides all the content behind a shroud of utter nonsense.  Hopefully they code better than they write English (a common engineering foible shared by this author as well).

They also use a LOT of screencasts.  Screencasts have their place, when done well (example).  However, the 1 that I’ve looked into up to this point goes on about how easy it is to set up SubSonic while scrolling past the code the author is adding after about 1 second.  Screencasts don’t have the best pause mechanism, so it’ s pretty easy to miss what the author is typing.  You also can’t copy/paste from a screencast.

More will follow.  Since there isn’t actually anything useful on how to set SubSonic up in a client application, and that’s what I’m writing, I’ll do that once and if I figure it out.  The frustration had risen to a point where I needed to vent, and where better than the solitude of a blog?