>I am doing some maintenance on an ASP.NET app. The app is split into 3 tiers and is extremely object-oriented. I wanted to see the logic used when added line items to a detail section, so I set a breakpoint in the Page_Load event. To help understand the flow, I closed all open documents in my IDE except for this webform and its code page.
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>About 250 Step Into's later, I hit my first call to the DAL. There are now about 40 files open that I had to step through. There's no real magic going on here... just a simple call to the database and displaying records. It probably could have been done in under 50 lines. I still haven't answered my initial question.
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>Is a situation like this normal in the real world, or did the developer before me have way too much time on his hands to program (and not enough to document)?
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>When does sophisticated and powerful code cross the "not easy to maintain" line?
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>I usually try not to criticize other people's code as I know I have a lot to learn yet, and I have learned a lot from this previous developer, but I have spent way too much time trying to fix a few small issues.


Can't answer your question either. As I mentioned elsewhere I was in that same boat, having inherited an almost finished app (ASP.NET C# 2.0). Very verbose, very OOP. The kid that did it obviously went by the Computer Science classes book. All was OOP, returning collections within collections instead of DataSets, physical 3-Tier (not just logical), with Web Services as the transport mechanism. Learned a few tricks. Disliked a few. Was not easy to follow, understand, and fix a few bugs, but I got all of it done in time.

Way too verbose, when you come from VFP. Not a bad app though (except for the almost total lack of inline comments).