Dot Net Ain't So Tough

[mik3cap]

I've been playing with .Net webforms lately... it took long enough, but Microsoft's finally done some things right. All the functionality I used to have to code back in the late 90s is now just a click of a property, visual-style. I was worried that going back to the world of traditional webapp development was going to be a bitchy transition, but this shit is a cakewalk.

I can see though how old school web designers/developers would be frightened off by the prospect of having to code in Visual Studio Land. Working in object-oriented Microsoftthink in C# or VB.Net can't be easy for someone who's never been exposed to that kind of thing, and you really do need to write your own classes and get under the hood to really get the cool stuff done. But I really like that there's a layer of abstraction above that level with the XML-style notation of web controls at the form source level; if you learn that stuff, you could pretty much hand code basic webforms.

Comments

[neuromancerzss.livejournal.com]

I really like C#, it's got (in my opinion) the right blend between OO and procedural and gui-based editting without being anything radically different from C++/Java/everything.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

True dat. Though there are a couple of language weirdnesses in C# that make some types of things easier to code in Java, I think C# is preferable and probably outperforms on speed and general usefulness because of the OS tie-ins to Windows. I've got some budding interest in working in DirectX and XNA with C#, I'm trying to find some free time to work on that.

I've been going back to my Unix roots too while I've been supporting the old system... and I'm finding that I didn't miss the crappy man pages, obscure commands, and archaic editors. Running SQL from the command line bites my ass compared to SQL Server Management Studio or whatever the heck it's called.